Ask Lemmy

Finance, there's a whole lot of arcane statistics underlying risk management.

Tech, the bleeding edge of computer science is really just applied math.

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

• 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.

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).

What does a mathematician do?

My guess would be maths.

Data analysis, data science, teaching, statistician, coding, finance and stocks

Well basically, people pay you to do math.
Hope that helped

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.

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analysis_(finance)

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.

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.

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.

I've had two software developer coworkers with math degrees

You do math

theoretically

Actuaries make a good living using mathematics for risk analysis.

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...

Finance industry.

Surprised no one has mentioned jobs like the NSA. They're thought to be the largest single employer of mathematicians.

The analytical skills needed for an advanced math degree are transferable to wide variety of jobs. The tech companies I worked for actively sought out people with those skills, mostly for jobs that didn't require high level math.

A friend of mine works for a baseball team as a statistician making incredible amounts of money.

same way most of higher-academia does, by living off the investments of your parents

I don't know a lot about other fields but stat people are hired a lot by research institutions. A good statistician can reduce the number of experiments you need to do, being able to test a drug/treatment with 7 people instead of 100 means a lot. They save a lot of money.

Also being able to make inference from past data, incomplete data, use correct math (there is always different ways to solve things) so they don't make mistakes.

And a lot of people with stat degree join either academia, or other fields that have actual problems and use their background to solve issues.

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?

Make Numberphile YouTube vids

You could get hired as a consultant for a state-of-the-art zoo.

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".