Beyond that, however, Finnegans Wake is just the most incredible piece of art I've ever seen. If you like solving puzzles, that's a book for you. It's the hardest book on the planet, and it's beautiful. A single sentence in that book blows away most literature I've read, period. Understanding it in its entirety is near-impossible. That's why I'd take that over the billion dollars.
(Mind you, I'd take a billion dollars over most other things. I like earning money a lot.)
I think that the proper route is to learn both science and art. I don't know that much about various individual fields of science, though I'd really like to, but I know that there's definitely an art to the way math works, and I'm sure it extends to other stuff too.
Oh, and a severe note of warning: Finnegans Wake is extraordinarily tough to read. It's online, so you might want to take a look at it before you go out of your way to read it.
I don't dig on standard MBA-style fancy-lexicon-of-big-words-business despite undergraduate work in business/project management, and all the wealthiest people I know are dropouts or never attended. But for me, the making money thing is about problem solving, and then getting some of the value you created (which is just another, specific kind of problem solving). Means I can do love and money at the same time.