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?
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.
angry updoot >:c
Sauce?
No, whole.
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?
You 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.
- 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.
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
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
What does a mathematician do?
My guess would be maths.
Yes, of course. But what math? For who? In what setting?
Pure mathematicians often answer questions that really only other pure mathematicians care about, but occasionally their results or techniques have relevance in other fields, so universities will pay them to work on this stuff and publish papers. Usually part of the job is applying for grants to fund your research and teaching students.
Doesn’t that depend on the kind of math you studied?
Innit?
Data analysis, data science, teaching, statistician, coding, finance and stocks
Well basically, people pay you to do math.
Hope that helpedMathematician 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.
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’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 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 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.
They make good actuaries and my cousin with a math PHD designs efficient packaging which is apparently really fucking hard to do, way more complex than you’d expect
I very briefly had a job as a mathematician for a company that certifies pokies (slot machines). I was technically also a software dev, but my job mainly consisted of calculating the theoretical average returns for each machine, writing basic code to simulate the machine for millions of games and then making sure those two numbers matched. I’d pass that on to a physical testing team who hack them to run real games.
It was a horrible fucking job and I got out basically a month after I finished my training. All we did was prove the machines were exactly as profitable as allowed in whatever location they were going to be deployed at…
Now I work as a regular software developer and it’s also a horrible job.
So… How profitable were they?
It depends on the region, we were certifying globally. I don’t remember the numbers that well, it was years ago and I only did a few months there, but I think it’s something like a 98% return for the player, so if you put $1 in, you get 0.98¢ back on average.
Thanks! I would have thought it be less for sure.
Is it so that the cash builds up and augments the chance of winning the more you lose (reward mechanism)? I read somewhere the coins were physically dumped in a bucket (huess some went yo the bank) and the heavier it weights the bigger the chance of winning it (like when completely full you insta-win). Guess if it existed it was an ooold machine :-)
It’s just a regulated amount set by the government of each region, the manufacturers want to make them as profitable as possible, but the regulations say they can only be so profitable. The thing is, if you’re losing 2% per game, it doesn’t seem like much, but the point of slots is you play a lot of games, people sit there for hours and hours and the machines can run multiple games at once in some cases. You can lose all your money quite quickly.
I never worked on physical machines so I can’t really answer any questions about coins, I just got data sheets with the reels on them and info about stuff like custom rules and bonus rounds.
Yeah it’s maybe more insidious with a 2% loss rate too. I went to a casino once in my lifetime because friends, lost like 20€ split in 4 actions, and that’s it. Had I been able to play for 20 minutes, gaining a little but eventually losing it all I might have felt I got something for the money for example.
Did you also calculate the variances, or just the means?
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
I am not a mathematician, but sometimes I get accused of being one; so given that no real mathematician have answered, I guess I can give it a shot.
Mathematician are in charge of building mathematical tools that are used by physicists, computer scientists, and many other subjects, including artist.
Why is math useful: mathematics are used in social science, physics, computer science and many other subject. Take a simple example from computer science: everyone is very excited about quantum computing, but what questions can be answered faster by a quantum computer than a classical computer? This is both a computer science question and also a math question. Many mathematicians are working on problem like these.
What is the difference between mathematican, computer scientists, physicist, and so on: although people from other subject also use advanced mathematical tools and work on similar questions as mathematicians (I guess why I was accused of being a mathematician), the difference is in their approach. Typically, for non-mathematicians (like me), proofs and math tools are means to an end. We often want to prove a very concrete problem (like are two reasonable ways to define the meaning of a program are equivalent), and usually we prefer the proof the takes the least amount of effort to get to the conclusion. Whereas mathematician often makes connection between different approaches, generalize, and just explore things that they feel is interesting. The mathematical approach often is slower but also gives deeper understandings: although it is common for many of their insights to be lost through time, it is also quite often for these exploration leading to important breakthrough in other fields.
What is the life of a mathematician like: like every other academic: teaching, research, writing grant to feed yourself, and sometimes traveling to discuss ideas and start new projects. I imagine OP is most interested in is mathematical research. I feel the most apt analogy is the creation of art: for an artist, they usually have a emotion trying to express, either something they see or feel. Then they do a couple sketch, see what detail/style works in expressing their ideas and what doesn’t, then paint the painting. For mathematicians, they often have a question in mind, then they try some examples to see what steps closer to their goal and what leads to dead ends. Through these excersices they gain a intuition of what conditions are important for the desired conclusions, then they paint the full painting by finishing the proof.
These proofs can be exceptionally time consuming: even for computer scientists, they can easily take couple researcher a year of work to do a proof. Most of the sketches will be thrown away, either because they are too convoluted or because they don’t lead to the correct conclusion. Usually, a proof by computer scientists like me can easily take 20-30 pages to explain properly, if not more; and the proof that were thrown away can double that quantity. I can only imagine proofs for mathematicians will be even more energy consuming.
Have you been accused of being an LLM?
Ha, because I bold stuff. Yeah that does look a bit like LLM on retrospect.
But you can see these are not AI generated, because they like repeating trivial conclusions reached in previous paragraphs, which I hope I didn’t do. :)
Also grammar mistake is another giveaway.
That’s exactly what an LLM pretending to be a human would say ;)
