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Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

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Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#101

Post by mraza007 »

jtmcmc wrote: post #51
impendia wrote: post #28

I am a mathematics professor (at a non-elite university). If anyone has advice on how I can help our students (at all levels -- undergrad and grad) get jobs in any of these industries, I would be grateful to listen!

I have a Bs in applied mathematics and I'm a software engineer. I think that mathematicians make incredible software engineers (not me necessarily ) if they do two things, take some basic cs classes, get co-ops/internships programming. I faced a _lot_ of bias when getting into the industry because people didn't want to train me to program or thought I'd be too weak of a software engineer, etc... and I believe having…

I think that’s true maths provides the problem solving skills

Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#102

Post by alexchamberlain »

What are your interests? What kind of work/industry are you looking for?

I graduated MMath in 2012 and have just completed my 5th year as a Software Engineer at Bloomberg. I had a lot of programming experience, which helped. We have a specialist graduate program for non-CS grads.

Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#105

Post by jkingsbery »

I used to manage a data science team for an ad-tech company. Applied modeling problems come up a lot in advertising - how to model an event as a probability distribution, how to use several of these probability distributions to solve optimization problems in order to get most benefit given a fixed budget, and so on. During my time managing that team, we had a few former PhD's (both graduated and all-but-dissertation).

Since you asked, I currently work at Amazon, and we're hiring PhD's as applied scientists: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?base_query=phd+mathematics

Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#106

Post by sillysaurus3 »

jordigh wrote: post #99
roel_v wrote: post #55

Not me, that's for sure. I interviewed two maths phd's years ago, who wanted to get out of academia because they felt themselves above chasing grant money, but then didn't want to do anything that wasn't their phd topic or related (of which I didn't even understand what it was, and they couldn't explain, or give examples of what it could be used for). On the other hand, I did hire people who studied maths in programm…

That was my experience. All my math degree ever did was mildly impress potential recruiters, but I had to learn how to code things unrelated to mathematics to get a job. The only job I was able to get as a mathematician "outside" of academia was a brief stint teaching high school mathematics. Which was fun and I would do again if the pay were higher.

It was fun? Could you talk about that some more?

Any time someone talks wistfully about a job they'd like to have, it's good to listen.

Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#107

Post by lopatin »

tomsthumb wrote: post #104
lopatin wrote: post #103

Who hires physicists? Asking for a friend.

IIRC Wall Street is the biggest employer of physicists. They get all the really nutty math and can apply it to models, etc. That might just be Ph. D's though.

Is that still true? Now that exotic securities are looked down on, and the safe ones are established don't require Ph. D level research anymore?

Follow up: You are right of course about Wall Street. NY, there's no better place for a physicist that is tired of being broke. But, is the same true about other big cities? Chicago, LA, Houston, SF? Is there any chance? Or is NY Google, and Chicago is Bing at best?

Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#108

Post by yaseer »

If you see mathematics as a highly transferrable and broad intellectual skill (rather than a narrow profession), everybody hires mathematicians.

In software and computer science especially, mathematicians are likely to find a compelling place to apply and develop those skills.

I've often thought the skillset for mathematics and software engineer are isomorphic. Interestingly, there's a mathematical theorem showing that to be true for functional programming (Google Curry-Howard correspondence).

My observation and experience is that good mathematicians make great software developers. I believe Ryan Dahl dropped out of a PhD program for algebraic topology and made node.js as one of his first open source contributions.

Re: Ask HN: Who hires mathematicians?

#109

Post by red_hare »

En_gr_Student wrote: post #97

I'm a mechanical engineer with strong minors in applied computational mathematics and scientific computing, and math has been, for me, a super-power. It opens all kinds of thermal, structural analyst jobs. I can optimize all kinds of stuff. I can automate simulations and plot the results in ways that the non-technical can get a good idea of the right direction to go. That all comes from math. Can you hand-code a solv…

I definitely feel the same way about my double-major in Math. My favorite super power that came from the degree is probably "being able to read a statistics text book". I turns out that lots of industries run on statistics. And, if you can read a boring text book that covers the statistics used in that industry, you suddenly understand why people are doing what they're doing in that industry; making you a domain expert.

Anything you can link to to read more about Karl Kempf? A quick google hits linked-in and paywalls.

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