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?
theoretically
same way most of higher-academia does, by living off the investments of your parents
Mathematicians are very sought after in finance and (quantitative) consulting as well as in software engineering.
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
Agencies like the NSA really like mathematicians so there is use for them in cryptography
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.
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.
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.
Finance, there’s a whole lot of arcane statistics underlying risk management.
Tech, the bleeding edge of computer science is really just applied math.
I thought applied math was just buying a silly amount of apples…
No, that is appled math.
Sauce?
No, whole.
angry updoot >:c
I’m pretty sure your job title isn’t “Mathematician” though. You’re a “risk analyst” or “quantitative analyst” or something. You’re also not doing pure math, you’re using somewhat advanced applied mathematical processes to model financial information. Just like how a rocket engineer isn’t a physicist but may have a background in physics.
some of them, especially in cryptography, are definitely just straight up mathematicians
So the 6’ 4" guy in finance is just a tall math whiz?
I knew two mathematicians, both worked at NASA. Met one coaching dance (side job) and one gymnastics (his retirement job). I’m not entirely sure what they did exactly, beyond “math”.
I got offered a job at NASA. It was very tempting, primarily because I would have gotten to see space maneuvers.
However, they had no WFH openings and the department that was offering me a position was only using technologies with which I was already familiar. Unfortunately I had to decline.
Data analysis, data science, teaching, statistician, coding, finance and stocks
- Teaching
- Research jobs
- Tech
- Wall Street shit
- Accounting
- Loss protection such as fraud prevention or forensic accountiing
- Sell dime bags outside your local convenience store
- stripping
- painting houses
- carpentry
- day laborer’s
- pouring concrete.
Well basically, people pay you to do math.
Hope that helpedYou work somewhere that can afford to pay you. Physics labs helping research. Universities doing theoretical work. Or you teach.
Those are pretty much it.
Im an electrician so dont expect more insight from me
Or software development. Math majors tend to make good programmers.
Their job title isn’t mathematician though.
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
