First off, I have no interest in being a mathematician. Math was always and continues to be quite difficult for me.
So, as an outsider to advanced math, it blows my mind that there are people who’s entire job title is mathematician. How does that work? What does a mathematician do?
You get picked up as a pet project by the Financial Engineering Professor at your college who teaches you a lot of statistical wizardry and sthochastic calculus and grooms you to become his newest and greatest quant he can brag to his Wallstreet buddies about. They have already seen your projects with the professor, the interview is pomp.
You make 2M your first year and are making well over 10M by your fifth year. You work 80+ hours a week, making some other people very, very rich. After a decade you are very burnt out and wondered why you ever wanted to do this in the first place. You quit your ridiculously high paying job at your hedge or whatever fund and move to upstate NY to get your teaching credentials and then go teach maths to high school students who will ask “when will this ever be useful” and you smile in your quietude over the whifs of the coffee in your thermos as the students finish the pop quiz of the day.
That’s what mathematicians do in my experience.
congrats on being rich af
I feel like Vince Gilligan wrote this
Mathematician here (algebraic topology). Pure maths is pretty much an internship in academia. Applied math is anything between basically physics to actuary and finance. Since pure math is highly academic, though, there is no predefined job path following a degree, which is why the question is as interesting as it is hard to answer.
In academia, we do weird and wonderful things that only a few peers in the world probably will see and understand, due to the highly specialized fields of study. In industry, anecdotally, we do surprisingly little math and are mostly sought for analytical skills and proficiency in problem solving.
Sadly, most people that hire us outside of academia do not know much math themselves. I believe there are lots of real problems that could benefit from having a mathematician working on them, but there is just too little understanding of mathematics to identify the need.
An actual mathematician has arrived!
So, it seems from this whole thread that math for math’s sake is not a money-making endeavor, but being the guy who runs the numbers for a company or institution is where the money comes from.
Is there a lot of stigma in pure math circles against people who move on to do applied mathematics?
Speaking from a pure maths’ perspective here: Frankly, a little bit. I think at the university research level, the academically inclined professors might be a bit tired to be sidelined with the applied ones, especially when the latter are applauded for their industrial cooperation (read research investments) and appliances (read private ownership over publicly funded research). My study mates and I joked about applied math being dirty, but in reality it is more the absence of creativity and rigor that is the problem with applied math in my opinion.
To me, math is all about answering cool questions, sometimes posing even cooler questions in the process. Maybe an appropriate analogy would be whether an artist judges those that make commercials. Exploratory work can take a life of their own that is usually not possible when the format of the answer is predefined. That being said, I do not really judge, I only think that the different expressions are (usually) quite distinct in direction and content. I did not do math for money, though I rely on my mathematical skills for income.
This is such a neat window into a whole different world for me, thank you for writing all this out!
It does sound very much like artists and the whole conversation of who’s selling out and who is being true to the art.
It seems to me that we definitely need both types in this world, ones like you who are curious and just want to explode the edges of what we understand for the sake of discovery, and ones who are willing to apply their mathematic knowledge to narrowly defined problems.
Honestly I would love to hire a statistician to do the analysis on any clinical research I do. I just wanna collect the broset scores every shift and request and assign staff to best balance them then let somebody else count how many (hopefully less) people got punched by patients vs not doing that. No way even the research hospital would’ve paid for that though.
theoretically
I had a math teacher once tell a joke:
What’s the difference between a mathematician and a large pizza?
A large pizza can feed a family of 4.
Although he was a teacher, so he was making alright money I think. But he also looked like Billy Corgan and was a ninja (well at least some degree of black belt).
Ah, professor Seldon. I’ve heard of him
Data analysis, data science, teaching, statistician, coding, finance and stocks
My son has a math degree and does computer programming.
Years ago one of my old military bosses had a math degree, he did stuff for national security. Secret secret stuff. I assumed it was all codes and decoding.
Well basically, people pay you to do math.
Hope that helpedsame way most of higher-academia does, by living off the investments of your parents
Maths is the cornerstone of engineering and science. It’s probably one of the most versatile skills. Add physics and you have a control/electrical engineer. Add computer science and you have a programmer. Add economics and you have an equity trader. Maths alone has huge scope in research.
Earning my ways with programming almost anything on anything for 40 years, let me tell you that a) I’ve never needed anything I learned in my universities math courses, and b) mathematicians make horrible programmers because they might know the theory, but often lack on the real programming side.
I call bullshit.
If you were coding in the 80’s i have hard time beliving you did not use math in Pascal or COBOL. And i remember needing lots of math with anything 3d in 2000
Also you cant state all mathematicians make horrible programmers because they often lack the “real programming side”. Its not a boolean. They might be bad coders because they are bad at coding, not because they are mathematics. Its like saying all painters are bad writers. Both coding and math have a lot of overlapping qualitities and people who understand other have easier time learning other, but it does not mean they are inherently good or bad in the other one.
I’ve never needed anything I learned in my universities math courses
You’ve been inverting matrices left and right. You just didn’t realise.
That’s not university level.
It is.
Inverting a matrix is undergraduate level, particularly the advanced algorithms.
Also the reasons why you need to invert a matrix are taught at university, not high school.
Tell this to my math teacher. On the other hand, school here is a bit tougher than in the US.
Well, if you are already doing LU decomposition then I’m impressed.
I suppose it depends what the program is for. If it’s UX then probably not a lot of use to know advanced maths. I was thinking about the process of creating mathematical models of physical systems and embedding them in an ECU or creating encryption schemes or deriving models from large datasets. Maths trains us to think logically. Computers are fundamentally logical and must strictly obey mathematical rules if we want answers.
Add computer science and you have a programmer.
I mean, while this definitely does happen in reality, in particular if you count data scientists towards programmers, I feel like I need to point out that neither knowing computer science, nor maths, makes you a good programmer.
In fact, if you tell me someone is a computer science professor, I will assume that they are a bad programmer, because programming takes practice, which is not something they’ll have time for.
Finance industry.
Danny Moses: You’re completely sure of the math?
Jared Vennett: Look at him, that’s my quant.
Mark Baum: Your what?
Jared Vennett: My quantitative. My math specialist. Look at him, you notice anything different about him? Look at his face.
Mark Baum: That’s pretty racist.
Jared Vennett: Look at his eyes, I’ll give you a hint, his name is Yang. He won a national math competition in China! HE DOESN’T EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH! Yeah I’m sure of the math.
Mathematicians are very sought after in finance and (quantitative) consulting as well as in software engineering.
It’s similar to how there are witches on Etsy that you can buy spells from. A customer goes on Etsy and pays a mathematician to do a love sum, or a death calculation, or a good luck multiplication.
Whats the going rate for good luck multiplications nowadays?
To tell you that, I’d need to a “describe number” ritual which is $30
Do you take nfts as payment?
Gift cards only I’m afraid
You do math
Woah slow down.
Agencies like the NSA really like mathematicians so there is use for them in cryptography
I assume you mean ppl who literally have “mathematician” as a job title? A few I could think of…
- I’d guess most likely as an academic researcher. There are academics in just about any field you could imagine, a lot of which are even more abstract/“useless” than advanced math. Not a traditional “job” in the sense that academics don’t directly add value to the economy… but are paid to do research that hopefully other people can add value based on. Downside is that these job openings are insanely competitive especially for the aforementioned “less useful” fields, because they are based on an organization having spare money to support research…
- As a cybersecurity researcher maybe? A lot of modern-day cybersecurity (the original “crypto”, before it became associated with bitcoin) are based on advanced math, so I’d imagine such expertise is still needed
- Somewhere in finance maybe? A lot of modern-day finance are built on data science/statistics, although I suppose this job fits statisticians better…
Applied math works everywhere, from engineering, to public health, finance, logistics, insurance…
