Mathematician - As a career option

Introduction

Even though it is hailed as the subject that routinely gives high school students sleepless nights, mathematics is the single most influential field of study in the world that has made human beings what they are today.

If you learnt one thing in high school, it’s probably that maths is what really makes the world go round. Hence, a career in mathematics is a career at the very crux of the wheels of civilization and development.

Career prospects of a Mathematician

Strangely and yet, predictably, most mathematicians do not become famous for their achievements and contributions even though successful ones can make an obscene amount of money.

This is because the contributions that mathematics has for the arts and sciences and even commercial fields of endeavours are at a very fundamental level.

Most mathematical concepts of the day can be viewed from two perspectives – from the perspective of natural sciences (read physics), and from the perspective of the computer scientist.

For example, take vectors – while a physicist sees a vector as a physical quantity with a magnitude and a direction, a computer scientist might interpret them as simply a list of numbers to be taken together.

Mathematicians are important because they will tell you that this is, in fact, the same thing – and their input is invaluable in situations where a scientist would need the input of computers to predict phenomena or the behaviour of designs.

Moving onto more commercial applications of mathematics, one of the most fascinating areas that come to mind is cryptography, one that fiction writer Dan Brown brought into the considerable limelight in his best-selling novel “Digital Fortress”.

Mathematicians are vital to the making and breaking of codes, with applications ranging from password protection of your Facebook profile to the breaking of coded messages during wars.

Mathematicians are also ideal candidates as stock-brokers and statisticians, which are disciplines where being good with numbers is crucial.

Eligibility criteria to become a Mathematician

• +2: Must graduate with mathematics in high school curriculum
• Bachelor’s Degree: BA/BSc in Mathematics
• Master’s Degree: MA/MSc/MPhil in Mathematics

Mathematics is a fundamental field of study and you can get into it directly after your high school when you enrol in college. Note, however, that most mathematics programs offered in India get filled up by some of the brightest students produced every academic session.

Hence, if your eyes are on mathematics as a career, you’re going to have to study hard to ace your board examinations!

Once in college, you’ll probably be pleased to find that mathematics has changed – from being menial calculations of numbers that involved your school curriculum, mathematics evolves into a breathtaking world of possibilities and novelties that’ll indubitably get you hooked deeper and deeper into the discipline.

Once you graduate you can pursue masters’ and doctoral degrees in mathematics or directly get to work in one of the thousands of available choices!

Career as a Mathematician

Mathematicians find work in various avenues of life, and Srabanti's career enables her to be a bridge between science and computation. There are numerous other possibilities for a mathematician in the future, and the only thing that all of them have in common is the love of numbers and a passion for logic.

A day in the life of a Mathematician

Hi, I’m Srabanti. I work for a leading provider of software company providing computing solutions for scientists. I have an MSc in applied mathematics from a top institution in India.

Maths was my first love and my work is the single strongest driving force in my life. Linger on for a look into how amazing life as a mathematician can be!

9:00 AM: I arrive at my workplace. I work as part of a team in a state-of-the-art office where some of the world’s most complex mathematical formulations are solved on a regular basis.

We have a series of software packages that have methodologies to solve complex systems of linear and partial differentials equations built into them for use by scientists and engineers. The mathematics involved in their solution is highly advanced and to say the least, fascinating!

11:00 AM: The only thing I have to do in the first half today is coding. I’m trying to incorporate a relatively newer technique known as the Generalized Minimal Residue Method (GMRES) to solve a series of equations known as the Navier-Stokes Equations.

If you haven’t taken advanced math or physics, chances are that you haven’t heard of these: they’re possibly the most complex pair of equations known to humans that are used to describe the behaviour of complex fluids in virtually any environment.

1:30 PM: Post lunch, and I’m at a weekly meeting that I have with my team regarding last week’s progress. Everyone shows their portions of the work and the group discusses as a whole to reach a general agreement on what’s going well and what needs more attention.

At the moment, my own key focus is to reduce the amount of processing power and time required to solve those equations I mentioned earlier by making my solution simpler without affecting the accuracy.

3:00 PM: I’m going to teach at a two-hour workshop arranged by my company to train both young and experienced scientists how to use our computing platform to the fullest extent.

I’m not the only instructor – there are two other people focusing on their respective areas of specialization – I’m going to be talking briefly about the methodology that we take to solve various systems.

5:00 PM: While people from various areas of science and technology require the use of solvers such as ours, most of them do not concern themselves beyond a point about the maths. One of the things that I as a mathematician have to deal with is to make my solvers self-sufficient.

Workshops such as the one I just participated in allows me to assess the level of understanding the average user has of the services we offer. Naturally, the company has professionals interacting with customers full-time, but as a programmer, I find this extremely helpful and I'm going to spend another hour talking to the attendees of the workshop.

6:00 PM: Time to call it a day!

Do you like mathematics? Are you looking for pursuing a career as a mathematician?

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