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?
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.
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 suprisingly little math and are mostly sought for analytical skills and proficiency in problem solving.
Sadly, most people that hire us outside of academia does not know much math themselves. I believe there are lots of real problems that could benefit from having a mathematician working on it, 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?
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.
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.
Finance industry.
You out math people who have money so they give money to you.
The trick is you make it a complex black box so that no one knows how it works. See debt derivative models.
You do math
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…
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
Well basically, people pay you to do math.
Hope that helpedData analysis, data science, teaching, statistician, coding, finance and stocks
Finance, there’s a whole lot of arcane statistics underlying risk management.
Tech, the bleeding edge of computer science is really just applied math.
So the 6’ 4" guy in finance is just a tall math whiz?
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
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).
Depends on which kind of mathematician you ask for, can he utilize said math in engineering, for example, or does he only know pure math?
- 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.
