What are the math heavy CS areas with high demand? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by davidxc » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 3:29 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #27

Quick question- are you aiming for a computer science/software job with lots of math, or a math job that involves computing? It's an important distinction. The people who are doing math with the help of computers (rather than doing software that uses math) are much more involved in mathematics.

I was primarily thinking of software jobs that involved lots of math, but that's partly because I'm not really aware of what math jobs are out there (and most math jobs seem to require a graduate degree, which I'm not interested in pursuing right now).

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

#52

Post by mcdemarco » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 3:51 PM UTC

Bioinformatics.

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

#53

Post by primitivesuave » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 6:37 PM UTC

broodbucket wrote: post #22

primitivesuave wrote: post #21

Graph theory - it has an immense amount of overlap with computer science.

Sure, but is there work in graph theory outside of academia? Obviously there are people who use it to solve real problems but I'm unsure if you can really get a job as a graph guy.

It depends, when I worked at a big company that produced a CAS (computer algebra system) they had an entire team for building graph theory ideas into the software. When I worked at a startup working on urban traffic congestion, there was just one guy who had done some surface-level reading one weekend on max-flow-min-cut and some basic algorithms. Knowing graph theory definitely helped me get that startup job (and take over as "the graph theory guy")

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

#54

Post by primitivesuave » Sun, Oct 06, 2013, 6:39 PM UTC

broodbucket wrote: post #22

primitivesuave wrote: post #21

Graph theory - it has an immense amount of overlap with computer science.

Sure, but is there work in graph theory outside of academia? Obviously there are people who use it to solve real problems but I'm unsure if you can really get a job as a graph guy.

Actually, now that I think about it, I am giving you quite a microcosmic example. I agree that coming across graph theory jobs is tough, but its still worth knowing, at least at a surface level.