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What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?

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Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?

#11

Post by maaku »

eropple wrote: post #7
davidxc wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the advice. I actually didn't know that graphics changed very fast. I'm only partly making this decision based on what's in demand. As long as the area is math heavy and broadly applicable, I'll probably enjoy it. Also, I was thinking of "in demand" with a more long term view. I would think that security and artificial intelligence would continue to stay in high demand well into the future. I mostly just w…

Graphics programming isn't that fluid. A lot of hay was made about moving away from fixed-function to the shader model, but since then it's been iterative API changes and growth to better target certain goals. OpenGL is throwing overboard most of the dumb stuff from its earlier versions and is turning into a pretty nice API overall. Now there's a lot of innovation in terms of specific techniques to achieve certain vi…

> The core techniques should be fairly static for at least the next 4-5 years.

That's very fast by the standards of other fields :)

Graphics has only slowed down by comparison to its own rapid pace in the late 90's / early 00's.

Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?

#12

Post by anologwintermut »

davidxc wrote: post #5
maaku wrote: post #3

Actually computer security doesn't change very fast compared to other industries, and is probably a very good fit if you have a math background. But machine learning would be fun too. Stay far, far away from graphics if you are worried about rapid change. But really, find what you're interested in and do that. It may involve trying them all out, or reading up some reference works on each. Making an important life dec…

Thanks for the advice. I actually didn't know that graphics changed very fast. I'm only partly making this decision based on what's in demand. As long as the area is math heavy and broadly applicable, I'll probably enjoy it. Also, I was thinking of "in demand" with a more long term view. I would think that security and artificial intelligence would continue to stay in high demand well into the future. I mostly just w…

Computer security in general has almost nothing to do with math. Cryptography specifically obviously does (the security and cryptography communities are pretty distinct). However, cryptographic engineering, which is what you would do with just an undergrad degree, has almost nothing to do with math at all.

Cryptographic research, on the other hand, can be math heavy. However, it typically draws on pure rather than applied math. E.g. number theory(RSA/factoring), algebraic geometry(ECDSA/elliptic curves, pairings over elliptic curves), and ideal latices.

Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?

#13

Post by twiceaday »

I graduated two years ago with this exact degree from University of Waterloo. My favourite subjects were Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity, and Computer Graphics. Throughout my undergrad I was somewhat hoping to go into game dev to work on graphics or physics engines. I ended up getting a ton of internship experience doing web dev, and now I work at Google. The math degree ended up being more of a hobby, and I'm ok with that. I am pretty lazy and so I found it hard to stick to my guns about utilizing both degrees on the job. You have to be prepared to move a lot, and to pass on very good opportunities. I prefer using my math knowledge for side projects and keeping it from becoming a job, though maybe thats just sour grapes.

Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?

#14

Post by maaku »

davidxc wrote: post #5
maaku wrote: post #3

Actually computer security doesn't change very fast compared to other industries, and is probably a very good fit if you have a math background. But machine learning would be fun too. Stay far, far away from graphics if you are worried about rapid change. But really, find what you're interested in and do that. It may involve trying them all out, or reading up some reference works on each. Making an important life dec…

Thanks for the advice. I actually didn't know that graphics changed very fast. I'm only partly making this decision based on what's in demand. As long as the area is math heavy and broadly applicable, I'll probably enjoy it. Also, I was thinking of "in demand" with a more long term view. I would think that security and artificial intelligence would continue to stay in high demand well into the future. I mostly just w…

> I mostly just want to choose an area where I can use many different branches of math, so I keep my math skills in practice. I also like writing code, as long as it involves math and is not boilerplate or repetitive.

You will be well at home in the field of AI (machine learning being the currently-in-vogue subfield).

Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?

#16

Post by [deleted] »

davidxc wrote: post #9
dill_day wrote: post #4

I think your thinking is right, machine learning is probably a good area as far as jobs go. Depending on your CS interests you'll find what areas of math they use most. AI / machine learning, learn lots of probability and statistics. High-performance, scientific computing, graphics, maybe more of a focus on linear algebra. Algorithms or theory or programming languages, lots of discrete math, logics, algebraic structu…

Thanks for the comment. High performance and scientific computing jobs seem a lot rarer than AI / machine learning jobs, which is why I think the latter is a better choice for me (I have no preferences between those areas right now). I'm also fairly interested to see how AI / machine learning develops in the future, and I think it will involve more math, so it definitely seems to be a good choice.

[deleted]

Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?

#17

Post by Mgccl »

davidxc wrote: post #5
maaku wrote: post #3

Actually computer security doesn't change very fast compared to other industries, and is probably a very good fit if you have a math background. But machine learning would be fun too. Stay far, far away from graphics if you are worried about rapid change. But really, find what you're interested in and do that. It may involve trying them all out, or reading up some reference works on each. Making an important life dec…

Thanks for the advice. I actually didn't know that graphics changed very fast. I'm only partly making this decision based on what's in demand. As long as the area is math heavy and broadly applicable, I'll probably enjoy it. Also, I was thinking of "in demand" with a more long term view. I would think that security and artificial intelligence would continue to stay in high demand well into the future. I mostly just w…

Why do you care about the high demand? We can put that aside for now--if you are a competent coder, you are in high demand...

If you want to have more math, then some subfield in CS theory is the way to go. CS theory have lot of elegant math. complexity, data structure, algorithms, combinatorial optimization, computational geometry. All of them have nice set of mathematical tools you can use. There are also unexpected ones that uses more traditional mathematics, like universal algebra for CSP, functional analysis in graph embedding with little distortion, and topology for computational topology(well that seems obvious, there are certain uses for computational topology, read up on persistent topology, which I guess is part of machine learning now).

Of course, the demands are low for pure theory students. However you can do some practical work. For example http://www.tokutek.com/ , founded by professors who specialize in cache oblivious data structures. Some more practical ones include cache oblivious data structures, sublinear time algorithms, string related algorithms. In Google, there are researchers working on how to optimize ads.

Also, I just don't see how you are going to write non-boilerplate code anywhere. everything eventually become repetitive(unless you use Haskell, anything new become a paper.)

Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?

#18

Post by espeed »

For a glimpse into machine learning, check out Professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa's "Learning From Data" course from Caltech. The videos are online for free (http://work.caltech.edu/telecourse.html, https://www.edx.org/course/caltechx/cs1156x/learning-data/11...), and its corresponding book is on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Learning-From-Data-Yaser-Abu-Mostafa/d...).

Also Professor Ng's course from Stanford (http://cs.stanford.edu/people/ang/?page_id=22).

Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?

#19

Post by sumodds »

I do Computer Vision/Machine Learning for a living, but would caution a little against super-focusing on a narrow area. AI in general is known for its AI winters, where jobs dry up and opportunities are far fewer and you could have a lot of people with undergraduate in ML (or whatever that era's AI is called). Now that said, who knows may be you might find it interesting enough that you may decide to go for graduate school. If I was giving advice to my younger self, it would be to learn Algorithms, Linear Algebra, and Probability really well. Get exposure to Machine Learning, and a little bit of Linear Programming. But if you really want to be able to apply machine learning or math heavy subjects to work, it might be a reasonable idea to do a Masters.

Re: What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand?

#20

Post by kkowalczyk »

I think you're setting yourself up for disappointment with unrealistic expectations.

People that are in demand are programmers and good programmers code 90% of time. Some people, including yourself, suggested graphics but read the history of DOOM and read its source code: despite being a cutting edge technology at the time, 90% of the code is the non-math drudgery: reading and writing files, networking code, performant array and string classes, making the code cross-platform and cross-compiler, debugging code etc. Carmack certainly knows his math but he knows his C even more.

Math might be helpful/necessary in some fields but if you're thinking about being a programmer (as opposed to academic/researcher), don't expect math to be more than 10% of your time. The rest is the same drudgery that the rest of us has to deal with on a daily basis.

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