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Mathematics Skills More in Demand Than Ever
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Jan 13, 2006 08:31 AM
from the i-just-watch-numb3rs dept.
from the i-just-watch-numb3rs dept.
knownsense writes "Business week has a nice article (feel good, low on detail, vague numbers) on the rise of maths and mathematicians in a world that is increasingly obsessed with statistics, advertising, search engines, and algorithms. The article also deals with issues of privacy. How has mathematics, statistics and other number driven aspects of life impacted you in the last decade?"
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Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in 1997, my new house was in the slow process of changing from plans on paper into bricks on concrete. One of the tasks that has to be done early on is to lay out the shape of the house accurately onto the land. My builder uses a sub-contractor to do that - and I had occasion to watch him work. He arrived in a beat up old pickup truck with four 'migrant workers' sitting in the back. In order to lay out the initial 'bounding rectangle' of the building, they follow this algorithm:
* Measure a baseline for the long edge of the rectangle. Mark it with two stakes hammered into the ground and tie a length of nylon string between them.
* Tie a second piece of string to one of the stakes and measure out the width of the rectangle along it. Eyeball the angle between the new edge and the baseline so it's roughly 90 degrees and you have an 'L' shape. One guy holds the string there.
* Do the same at the other end of the baseline. Now you have a 'U' shape and two guys are holding the open ends of the strings.
* Take a third piece of string - equal in length to the length of the rectangle. Give one end to each of the two guys who are already holding string. 'jiggle' them until all three strings are tight. You now have a parallelogram made of string, staked out at two corners.
* Now take two long tape measures and with one guy standing at each corner of our parallelogram, position the tape measures along the two diagonals of the parallelogram. With two guys holding the tapes on the baseline stakes and the other two holding onto the strings and shouting out the lengths of the diagonals, they jiggle the two free points until all of the strings are tight and the two diagonals tape measures are reading the same lengths. This requires a lot of shouting, cursing and everyone telling everyone else which way to move.
* Now they have a rectangle - so they bash in two more stakes and then level the whole thing with a really impressive-looking laser contraption.
Well, I watched this with some amusement - and asked why they didn't just calculate the length of the diagonal. The boss guy said that you couldn't do that - "It's impossible". I told him about Pythagoras' theorem. With the aid of a calculator (he didn't know what that funny 'square-root' key was for), I was able to show him how easy it is to calculate the length of the diagonal and do away with all the ugly 'jiggling'.
"Wow!" he said. Then he thought for a moment - "Now I'll only need three guys to hold the string!"...and fired one of them on the spot! I thought he was kidding - but the next day when they were measuring out the place for the garage, there was one less guy holding the string.
So, a 2,500 year old technological advance cost some poor guy his job.
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's always going to be a bottom rung of people who really can't do much more than run a cash register. What happens to them?
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's always going to be a bottom rung of people who really can't do much more than run a cash register. What happens to them?
The society works hard to shrink them to a smaller and smaller percentage of the populace through education. Fify years ago I'll bet you the percentage of unskilled labor was much higher in the US than it is now.
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Funny)
Not "win-win" *unless*... (Score:5, Insightful)
The economic theorem says that the monetary gain for the winners is great enough that it is *possible* for the winners to compensate the losers so to leave as well off as before. In this case everyone is at least as well off. But if you don't compensate the losers, you can't say a thing.
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Insightful)
why am I better of that I can buy this bag of apples 10% quicker then 5 years ago?
why?
perhaps I would be better of this bag of apples was grown in Ontario and shipped to me a few hundred mile, rather then the few thousand it probably was.
the ability to Consume more does not make the world a better place.
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, if you really think things are getting worse, let's make you King with absolute authority. What would you do to change things?
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, a 2,500 year old technological advance cost some poor guy his job.
That's one way to look at it. There's no denying that technology replaces some low level jobs. But on the other end the boss guy now has more money to spend on something else. He might pocket the money, or he might fire another guy and use the combined money to hire a more skilled helper. Then take on jobs that require more skill than simply staking out building sites.
If technology simply eliminated jobs without creating new ones, we'd all have been out of work a few thousand years ago.
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, the layout contractors I speak to (should) use instruments that allow them to layout their forms with not only no string, but also no paper. Plans are transfered to ruggedized PDAs, attached to instruments that calculate locations based on distance and angles from given landmarks, and stakes are pounded. They can increase productivity by 30% with very little effort at all. Some land suveyors are doing layout with GPS systems with sub-centimeter accuracy and are seeing 50-70% increases in productivity.
I dont mean to flame the parent, he/she is correct, the users in that industry dont use enough technology, but it is available to them.
PS: I think, no matter how much frickin money they make, they ALL drive beat up pickups
English skills? (Score:5, Funny)
That's nice, but which factor? 1 is a factor of 10
well lets just say (Score:5, Funny)
It hasn't gotten me laid yet.
Re:well lets just say (Score:5, Funny)
Computational Linguistics (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's say you have some corpus with N distinct words in it. For each word w you create a "context vector" vw of length 2N. In the first N positions there are counts for the number of time each word in the corpus appears immediately to the left of the word w, and for the second N positions there are counts of the same for the right context. The angle between any two vectors in this 2N-dimensional vector space produces a measure of the distance between the two words. If you use some kind of dimensionality reduction technique to get a 2-dimensional representation, you can see that although this technique is pretty crude linguistically speaking it does pretty well. Each language has a distinct "shape" in this regard, with similar words grouped together, i.e., in English there might be a cluster of points consisting of "singular nouns," or specific parts of speech, like prepositions. It can sometimes even group words by semantic domain, depending on your corpus.
Remember kids, computational linguistics is fun!
How much more? (Score:5, Funny)
is it 2x more? 3x more? Maybe 5(log n)x^2 more? sin(cos(log (pi) * -1/2)) + e? More importantly, how much has the standard deviation moved from previous years to this one?
Statistics are essential (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just unfortunate that so few people do have an understanding of statistics. I've lost count of the newspaper stories, even years-long media-fuelled "controversies"-, which are based entirely on misunderstood, misrepresented, or malformed statistics. "How to Lie with Statistics" should be required reading in high school.
Another application for math (Score:5, Funny)
and Texas Hold'em.
Math is hurt in the USA by its negative image (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Math is hurt in the USA by its negative image (Score:5, Insightful)
You know I would say that too many teachers don't teach pure mathematics, so the joy of exploration and discovery and logical thought is lost. Mathematics becomes rote mechanical rules that you unthinkingly chug through to produce some number which is supposed to be important. There is no questioning of why those rules are what they are, why the methods work, and what the structure actually is. The focus is on teaching kids the applications of math and they never get to understand how to think about math, how to think logically, how to explore the structure of our own mental creations. Mathematics is taught with absolutely no sense of wonder, or curiousity.
Teaching kids how to apply mathematics is important, but really not that hard. Teaching kids to see math as something other than a whole list of rules and methods and mechanical applications of formulas - now that takes some real effort. That, however, is what pure mathemathatics can get you.
Jedidiah.
Making money as a freelancer mathematician (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, I have a phd and I'm quite good at maths, having solved the 3 problems who where thrown at me in 1 year and a half (instead of the regular 3 years) but what I would like to do is :
solve mathematical problems/bring solutions to people/firms in exchange for hard coin.
Kind like a mathematician freelancer/mercenary : You do the job, you get the money and that's it.
I mean, there are web sites for freelancer artists/web developer/coder. But there isn't one for mathematicians.
So, the only way to make money out of maths (in france) is either to teach it or to research in an university. Either way, you are a salary man.
Man, that sucks.
What is the use for those monsters maths skills, that I patiently honed all these years if I can't even make a little cash out of it/or make more money out of it that the average teacher (that really sucks at research/high lvl maths) ?
Too late (Score:5, Interesting)
When I tell a girl I admire her Riemannesque topology and say her virtues are greater in number than those of the girls of Lesbos combined and raised to the googoolth power, she says: "Dude, you are such a sweetie, but I have to go now".
When I tell my neighbor he can make his wine cellar temperature independent by putting it y meters below the ground, he says "Well, aren't you a smarty, boy!", grins, and then returns home to put on the missis.
Financial industry (Score:5, Interesting)
Math majors from top schools are being recruited (along with other hard sciences, physics and CS) by banks, hedge funds, etc. and getting 6 figures right out of college. No kidding. The story is, about a decade or so ago, some hedge funds decided to try letting some really smart people (i.e. math majors from top schools) handle money. They did so well, they made a fortune and it turned the industry upside-down. Well, that might be an exaggeration, but it's more or less true.
Markets had a number of pricing inconsistencies, etc. in them, and these smart mathy people figured out how to take advantage of them. Lots of algorithms and computer programming found application to managing these hedge funds. To correct for these abuses, the markets had to close the gaps and inconsistencies these hedge funds were abusing.
Although a lot of the market problems have since been cleaned up, a lot of math is going into managing funds to maximize profit. There aren't as many people making millions off of just trading, but there's a lot of jobs in the financial industry for smart math people that still pay extremely well.
The financial industry learned its lesson: math is incredibly useful. This has already been obvious in industries like computer programming, where sophisticated math goes into designing algorithms. In the future, I think we'll continue to see other industries finding out how huge the benefits of math can be.
Re:Math vs Maths? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Math vs Maths? (Score:5, Informative)
This may surprise those of you who assumed that the British contraction is older than the N. American one, but the opposite is in fact true.
The first use of 'math' recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1849, whereas its earliest recorded entry for 'math' is in 1911, penned by the English War Poet Wilfred Owen
The well-known plural form 'mathematics' is to be compared with terms such as physics and metaphysics. In early use, the subjects were often referred to in the singular, as matamatik, fiskyke, and metaphesyk. In plural, they connoted something entirely different. For instance, physics was the title of Aristotle's collected physical treatises. 'Mathematics' would be used to denote the collection of the various branches of mathematics, such as geometry, algebra, etc. In modern usage, 'mathematic' and 'physic' have fallen by the wayside and the plural forms have taken their place.