Mathematics Skills More in Demand Than Ever 590
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?"
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:3, Funny)
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:4, Interesting)
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, since this guy [stormfax.com].
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:3, Insightful)
I have a hard time believing that
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't bet that. I'd bet that the so-called "unskilled laborer" of 50 years ago was better educated than the typical burger-flipper, low-level corporate or government bureaucrat, first-teir tech support or Congressman is today.
Have you ever heard of "College education today is like high school education of 50 years ago?" Well, people have been saying that for at least 50 years and there's a lot of truth to it.
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3, Interesting)
World War II saw the greatest expansion of education since....welllll World War I. It was still a boom economy in the fifties and the baby boomers were in full swing. Education was in full swing also. Many people who, as children, never had educations were getting their kids educations. Actually, not since World War II have we had so many people trying to better themselves and get an education (in the US that is). The dropout rate and educational rate of
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3)
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:5, Funny)
It wasn't really fair to require the poor blacksmiths to carry around the family and a trunkload of groceries anyway. I bet the blacksmiths were glad.
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3, Insightful)
> you look at it.
A `win win` in which context? Are people happier, safer, richer etc when there is more technology around them? I though technology was neutral? People in the 1950's were told that washing machines, vaccuum cleaners etc would allow housewifes/etc to get the jobs done so quickly they'd have more time for leisure, but repeated surveys of housewife's/etc show no increase in happiness.
You don'
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:3, Insightful)
People are living longer largely due to decreased infant mortality.
> Still, if you really think things are getting worse, let's make you King with absolute
> authority. What would you do to change things?
More equality of access to healthcare. Discourage the trend towards obesity by ensuring people can afford and have access to fresh fruit and vegetables every day. Encourage people to excersize. Encourage better/cheaper public transport so
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3, Insightful)
unhealthy food is cheap
unhealthy food is fashionable
unhealthy food is heavily advertised (when did you last see an ad for carrots, rice etc)
unhealthy food is available in every city,town, highstreet,corner shop, school,office
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3, Insightful)
Pasta, rice, potatoes, beans, lentils, cous cous, oatmeal, spinach, peppers, tomatoes, banannas, pita, eggs, chicken, and maybe 2 times a month I'll have a steak or something similar. If I run out of spices, I skip the steak for a month and spend that on restocking the seasonings. Most importantly, there's no ramen in my house.
I make a lot of soups or long-cooking dishes - crockpot cooking is wonderful, as I can get i
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets break it down.
One p
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3, Insightful)
> exist years ago.
That statement is true, but misleading. It's just that so many children didn't make it until their, say, 2nd birthday that the average was massively lowered.
> Exactly how are you going to compel people to do this stuff? Outlaw individual ownership of
> automobiles? Additionally, fruit and veggies aren't that expensive as far as the developed
> countries go.
Didn't you read the original
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:4, Funny)
Oh boy! Let's see:
It's good to be the King!
Whoa, whoa, whoa, WHOA (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me help you out here. I lived with a family of 6 whose yearly average of taxable income of $14,000 (c.2000). We received welfare ($600/month), food stamps ($250/month), and received subsidized rent via HUD ($-400/month). As you can tell, we were below the poverty line.
Now consider the average education level of those under the line. I think my family was a good example having a Vietnam-vet with a GED as a father and a middle-school-educated mother. They were not capable of finding significant income in an area that would allow "people like us" to live.
They eventually got a car-- an '80s junker on a 16% interest loan. We had 2 color televisions with cable. "Why?," you ask? because there is literally NO OTHER WAY OF ESCAPE in a society that focuses around entertainment! A one-time cost of $200 and a monthly cost of $25 is damn reasonable when you consider that most Slashdotters rarely think more than twice about upgrading their system (or buying a new one) with a pricetag of 200+.
Lastly, there's all the qualitative differences in a family that lives below the poverty line. There's frustration (an extreme understatement here) of being stuck and unable to provide. This anger is, more often than not, expressed physically with women and children on the receiving end. There's depression, lack of confidence, in ability to socialize outside of your born-in group as other groups cost money to associate with, no culture of education... there is no hope.
So, before you rain judgement from upon high based on severly miscalculated eyeball-assumptions, give it a shot.
--Ps. The polio thing made me laugh. If you're poor and living in California, you have a limited number of times you can see a physician, emergency room, dentist, or an optometrist in a year. When I was in high school ('96-'00) we had 6 stickers on our Medical tickets. 1) Glasses, 2) Fillings, 3) busted thumb in PE, 4,5,6) Tonsilitis. After that, and with a 104-fever, I was SOL.
Re:Whoa, whoa, whoa, WHOA (Score:3, Insightful)
I call utter BS!
They're called libraries. You walk in, get a library card and walk out with a book *AT NO ADDITIONAL COST TO YOU*. After you've finished that book, return it and get another one - *still free*! Nowadays, there are almost always free internet connections available as well.
Don't give me that crap about "You just don't know what it's like." I u
Re:Whoa, whoa, whoa, WHOA (Score:5, Insightful)
So, let me get this straight. You are with a ploor family, desperate for money, below the poverty line and getting helped by the state BUT they blow 20% of their income on cable? Did they also eat out at McDo regularly and buy cigarettes? Because for entertainment value, it does not get any better either.
However, i have new for you: Entertainment does not further anything. It does not allow you to grow, get better and get out of a bad situation. It is just a legal drug that helps you forget your trouble. Troubles dont go away by themselves, you need to face them to solve them, so staying in front of a TV wont solve anything. Neither will bitching or posting on
I know people that started with nothing (kicked out of their family home at 16 after being beaten by their dad), but they are successful today. How? They made their choice, got loans and credits, got an education and worked it out. Worked to pay their tuitions and boards, worked in class to succeed and worked and innovated to pay their bills. They could do it, but of course, it was a LOT more difficult than sitting on their butts watching TV and saying how desperate they were.
Life does not always deal you a fair situation and some needs to make more efforts to reach a given point, but USA is a land of opportunities. You can get an education and a job, but it will need LOTS of efforts if you dont get any help (family mostly).
Hope is how you look at things, not what is passed down to you. Every problem has a solution. Some required ungodly efforts to reach it...
(now, let's start the karma bashing...)
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as happier, people have signifigantly more control over how they spend their time and what they do. People tend to settle in to a level of happiness based not on their current condition, but on what they compare it to. Find someone and compare what they would have had in the 50's to what they have now and see if what they have now makes them happy.
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:3, Informative)
If you think that was bad, you should look at how most framers put up rafters. My dad could do all those measurements in his head. On one house we did, my dad actually had me use the blue book (the one you get when you buy a speed sqaure) and the framing calculator to figure up the roof system. We still finished that house fa
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3, Funny)
I was completely mystified about what this could possibly have meant, until I remembered that you guys don't use the metric system.
I guess converting from 11.764 feet to 11 feet and the appropriate number of inches would be a bitch. I'm just surprised they put the conversion into a special "square root" button and don't just
Re:Ancient Greek Technology Costs Jobs. (Score:3, Funny)
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
Hmmmm (Score:4, Funny)
The Pure Profession (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, a better question would be, "What part of my life hasn't been impacted by math?"
I've always liked math. And, in the past decade, there has been much evidence pointing toward math being a primary component in a better lifestyle. It didn't fully hit me until I was a freshman in college and my computer science courses started crossing paths with my linear algebra courses.
But even in grade school,
Re:The Pure Profession (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a math/sci geek too (do you have to SAY that on
Google for "Gödel's theorem", or maybe "metamathematics" before knee-jerk replying, please.
Re:The Pure Profession (Score:2)
This wasn't a knee-jerk reaction, this is something I've thought quite a bit about. I'll stand by mathematics before I'll stand by any other -ism in the world. Yes, mathematics has holes. The great thing is that the community recognizes they're there and they are constantly striving to examine them. Not fix them or make them go away but understand them better.
Re:The Pure Profession (Score:2)
Also, by knee-jerk reaction I was more anticipating other's super-rational zealotry responses, not referring to you
Re:The Pure Profession (Score:3, Informative)
There called Axioms, and they are needed in all formal logic. If you really don't understand this concept visit:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Axiom.html [wolfram.com]
Re:The Pure Profession (Score:4, Informative)
BTW, if you're a CS major, you've encountered this in the form of the Halting Problem
Re:The Pure Profession (Score:3, Interesting)
Non-Euclidean geometry was the first evidence of this fact. The axiom was that any point can have only a single line that passes through it parallel to another given line. Euclid took this as an axiom, and went o
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Pure Profession (Score:2, Interesting)
You know it always amazes me that when anyone talks about math they start talking statistics and calculations. This is not pure mathematics. Statistics is its own breed and calculations are for the engineers, pure mathematics is about abstractions of formal logic.
Now if we wanted to start talking about ring theory, field theory, galois theory, real analysis, topology, etc. these are examples of the pure mathematical concepts. Not number crunching. All of these other things like "statistics" and "applied m
English skills? (Score:5, Funny)
That's nice, but which factor? 1 is a factor of 10
Calculator (Score:2, Funny)
well lets just say (Score:5, Funny)
It hasn't gotten me laid yet.
Re:well lets just say (Score:5, Funny)
Re:well lets just say (Score:2)
She spent a good minute trying to figure out how to count them...I kid you not! She even tried to get the bag guy to help. Finally I showed her how to count them out to show it was $120.
I didn't even know how to feel. A little shocked I suppose.
Be pushed around (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Be pushed around (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Be pushed around (Score:3, Interesting)
The main impact on me (Score:4, Funny)
It made me go made hairline recede like crazy as I studied calculus in school and at college.
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!
Re:Computational Linguistics (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you discussing latent semantic analysis [colorado.edu] by any chance? ;^)
It performs well in certain areas (for example, completing certain MCQ's to the same level as humans), automatic essay marking (but read the Powers et al [ets.org] study for more), and other things. It's surprising how well it does despite there being a complete absence of grounding (grounding in artificial intelligence terms).
Re:Computational Linguistics (Score:2, Interesting)
this guy presents nothing new. there are a host of such vector-space techniques, such as Latent Sematnic Analaysis, which all depend on this crucial reduction of dimensions to collapse similar vectors in such a way that they move closer to each other. article here [wikipedia.org]. Not a great article to be honest, but I can't be bothered to edit it.
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.
Is this news? (Score:2, Insightful)
This is news only in the retarded world of business. I think we in the natural sciences have capished this quite a while ago.
From TFA:
Excluded middle (Score:3, Interesting)
At the same time I'm seeing mathematics positions than seemingly didn't exist before. The odd thing is that they were primarily math positions with some computer language requirements instead of the reverse. Instead of some actuarial positions, there are openings in software houses, animation studios, civil sector, etc..
Guess geeks will have their time in the spotlight again soon. Yay for me.
KLL
Re:Excluded middle (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The reason (Score:3, Insightful)
Back when computers were first put into use, their primary function was highly math-intensive - in fact, that's about all they did. I'd argue that much of what computers do today have little to do with math- much of the effort is focused on "e"-izing procedures that were formerly manual, or that require restructuring to accommodate a changing bsuiness climate. To be sure, there are still specialized pockets that rely on heavy math (like weather forecasting, statistical analysis, graphics, etc), but a degree
Re:Excluded middle (Score:3, Informative)
Whether a CS department originally descended from the maths or engineering sections of a school (and the corresponding implications that has for emphasis in curricula) depends on the school. For example, at the University of Texas - Austin, it is plainly descended from the mathematics department, and at the Dallas branch of UT (which historically had much closer ties to industry and thus a much strong applied focus than the
Re:Excluded middle (Score:3, Informative)
It's interesting that math teaching hasn't caught up with modern needs. Engineers need math, and there is a lot of focus on engineering mathematics. In practice that means lots of calculus and probably some l
Re:Excluded middle (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it really isn't. Engineering is fundamentally a pragmatic approach to producing things that are "fit for purpose" (or, more generally, an approach to solving problems). Now, part of that pragmatism is the realization that applying knowledge from the sciences and from mathematics during the design process makes it much more likely that the resulting product will actually function that way it is intended to. Hence the importance of mathematics in the eductaion
Where? (Score:3, Interesting)
i am a final year mathematics student whose dream isn't to work as an actuary or for a merchant bank. if anyone has advice on interesting fields where mathematicians are required rather than tolerated, i would appreciate it. or in general, advice on where to look.
i have studied almost exclusively pure maths, mainly analysis and number theory with some algebra and computational stuff, and can
Very Good! (Score:3, Funny)
That's EASY.. (Score:2, Funny)
Stopped me getting laid for most of it.
Next question...?
Paycheck (Score:2, Funny)
technology needs math! (Score:2, Informative)
Many of today's technologies wouldn't be possible without modern mathematical topics like Fourier Analysis [wolfram.com], the Shroedinger equation [wikipedia.org], and Symbolic Logic [about.com] just to name a few.
Most of us use these technologies on our ipods, cars, and computers without even thinking about them.
Yay, Math!
Perceptions of maths (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm currently at uni studying maths, and a huge number of the people on my course are from overseas. Is it only the UK which seems to suffer from some sort of violent social allergy to mathematical competence?
Re:Perceptions of maths (Score:3, Interesting)
Why math is the greatest of all subjects (Score:3, Interesting)
There's beauty and elegance in a mathematical result which will always remain true forever. School kids even today, study about the Pythogoras theorem - a mathematical result that was established more than 2 thousand years ago. You're learning Calculus that was discovered by Newton & Liebniz several hundred years ago. Compare this with other fields like Management where the MBA syllabus keeps changing as newer management techniques and new buzzwords/MBA jargon are invented.
Again, I don't mean to dis MBA dudes. It's just that in an fast paced information age where paradigms are constantly being challenged and new ones being invented, it is reassuring to have a body of knowledge that you can always depend on no matter what.
Seriously! You don't have to be good at math (I'm just a lowly Master's and that too in CS
Math is hurt in the USA by its negative image (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning in general is taking a hit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Learning in general is taking a hit (Score:3, Insightful)
Education in this country needs a serious reform. The primary focus should be making our children the brightest and best in the world.
Schools aren't the problem, it is society. Parents don't give a damn too often or think their kids are a gift from god and can never do wrong. There is little societal push for educa
Re:Math is hurt in the USA by its negative image (Score:3, Insightful)
As a programmer, I found that I was using maths beyond my
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.
Re:Math is hurt in the USA by its negative image (Score:3, Interesting)
In high school, when I was at home and bored, I wrote code to get objects to move around in 3D space on the screen. I figured out how to make smooth curves with cubic equations. I toyed with fractals because they looked cool. I made eclectic music by playing with trig functions.
The same year I was writing 3D transforms I was sent back a grade from trig back to algebra because I couldn't keep up. The
Re:Math is hurt in the USA by its negative image (Score:3, Insightful)
A deficiency in mathematics skills is "innumeracy [innumeracy.com]," a counterpart to "illiteracy." The scary part is that people nurture innumeracy [answers.com] as if it were a thing to be proud of. Imagine if people took innumeracy as seriously as they did illiteracy. The literacy rate is well trumpeted as a measure of a society's success. Imagine if the numeracy rate were as widely reported and remarked upon.
Re:Math is hurt in the USA by its negative image (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Parents who don't know math, and thus can't teach mathematical concepts to their kids beyond counting.
2. Elementary school teachers who deemphasize math in favor of reading and 'riting.
3. Popular culture.
The first cause is really only solveable if you solve the other 2 causes, because you need a generation of mathematically literate parents.
If you look at the people who are doing elementary school teaching, their primary focus tends to be tea
Humans create, Computers execute (Score:3, Interesting)
I have learned that you can do wonderful [google.com] and amazing [nasa.gov] things with machines and math, but machines themselves will never reproduce the creativity, insight, and wonder of the human mind.
Math can be useful like for this FoxTrot cartoon! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Math can be useful like for this FoxTrot cartoo (Score:3, Informative)
>>>l = ['01011001', '01001111', '01010101', '01001110', '01000101', '01010010', '01000100']
>>>''.join([chr(int(i, 2)) for i in l])
'YOUNERD'
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) ?
I am a freelancer mathematician (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Making money as a freelancer mathematician (Score:3, Interesting)
They have tremendous demand for mathematicians that can develop models to quantify risk.
This is not a trivial problem. It is quite technically challenging and requires very sophisticated mathematical skills. Oh, and you'll make more money than God.
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.
Re:Too late (Score:3, Insightful)
This is absolutely accurate. Most people working in technology are a) not very smart and b) have incredibly fragile egos. Not so different from most people in general, in fact. This makes life hard for anyone with actual skills.
I know not a few "data analysts"
Re:Too late (Score:3, Funny)
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.
just like martingale... (Score:3, Interesting)
But LTCM didn't have unlimited capital and did have a betting limit (you can't make a bet larger than the rest of the world is willing to take the other side on).
LTCM was betting martingale. That they had two Nobel prize winners and 250 more years of advancement and still ended up with a system that only works as well as martingale is both in indication of the level of foolishness on Wall Street and a real indication of the difficulty (poss
Ho! Ho! Ho! That's what they said in the 90's (Score:3, Insightful)
Know math... Yes... But as a platform to an applied field where you will stand tall with a strong math background.
Otherwise, get ready for low pay unless you graduated from MIT, NYU , or Cal Tech in a program designed specifically for the "latest" applied math craze. I watched graduates from a top 10 Applied Math Program grovel for 1 year post-docs. Many went into Comp Sci AFTER receiving their PhD because they did not want to enjoy the bountiful $35K they would get as a post-doc.
By the time a place like Business Week has an article on this, the top math programs located nearby the trend (Read that Boston, NY or Silicon Valley) already have a specialized sub-degree for the trend.
Also, be aware that PhD's tend to prefer hiring students from their adviser or their academic friends. Also a limiting factor for getting a job offer as these high end applied research jobs.
Yep, stick with your applied field and a strong math background.
Math has always been a necessity (Score:3, Interesting)
The simple fact is that only a small percentage of the population has the requisite knowledge of mathematics, and only a small percentage of them have the passion and drive to pursue math even further. I am one of those mathephiles, and I'm proud of it. The problem with the article is that non-mathletes don't necessarily understand mathletes. It raises privacy problems and such as problems in the mathematical world, but the real fact is, math really does nothing to avert privacy. Maty can be used to devise algorithms which may or may not undermine privacy. The real fact is, however, that overzealous entrepreneurs will attempt to bastardize the good applications of math for their own ill gain. I don't really see a problem with the mathematical progress we make. I personally think that if businesses use math, and consumers are too stupid to realize they are being pimped, for lack of a better term, by industry, then they deserve what they get. I will still be an alert person and protect my privacy by being careful. There is no substitute for common-sense.
The other problem I have is that we need to lure women and "ethnic minorities" into mathematics. Sure, it would be wonderful if there were more female mathematicians. But we can't simply set up a quota system for mathematicians. This is more of a society problem than education or anything. Big entertainment has put out this message that being intelligent is "uncool," especially when one is good at math. In fact, society scorns illiterates, but people brag about inneptities in mathematics. Look at the news media. They are preaching about this avian flu, but their already fragile case for hysteria is flattened by their fouled up statistics (no pun intended). They say the mortality rate is something like 75%. With a logistic growth model, that would knock off huge amounts of the population in its second stage, which has definitely not happened yet. But if you look at the sources of their statistics, they only accounted for people who have been confirmed with avian flu, and specifically those who died or were critically ill. The actual numbers of people who have been infected is probably much higher, and in past years many people have probably been affected by it and then overcame it, thinking it was a "normal" flu. With these people taken into account, the true mortality rate is probably much less. The lack of math knowledge in the media is terrible, because these people just utter words that they think they understand. "Mortality rate" is the ratio of deaths (with respect to something) per 1000 people. If you looked up infant mortality rate, it would be quoted as "n deaths per 1000 live births". When society en masse becomes more attentive to mathematics, then we will start to see women enter the field.
'Ethnic minorities' was the phrase that stumped me. Why do we beat around the bush and use this PC "ethnic minority" crap? I work in a physics lab with physicists, enginneers, and mathematicians. Its like the friggin' UN in there. A guy from Thailand, one from India, a Pacific Islander, a guy from China, a black guy, then two white guys (another guy and I) all work in an office. There is no clear majority! The only real fact is that we're all men. What pisses me off is that we can't say "we wish more blacks would enter the mathematics field," we have to say "we hope 'ethnic minorities' enter mathematics." Ethnic minorities are distributed all throughout mathematics in the US. Asians, Indians, and Arabs are all present in mathematical fields. Maybe when ignorance by the media is overcome, and the real truth is confronted, then we'll see mathematics interest really spike across the board.
Re:Math vs Maths? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Math vs Maths? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Learning more math (Score:3, Informative)
They are extremely useful for reviewing material that you once new, and they're not too bad as a text for exploring things you've never formally learned.
Jim