Interesting Careers for People with Good Math Skills

بِسْــــــــــــــمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيْـــــمِ

The following is a Guest Post from Brian Jenkins, who writes content forbraintrack.com, where he has been a member of the writing team since 2008.

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Mathematics has a vital role in a variety of rewarding and good paying careers. For example, algebra is important in the fields of cryptology, computer science, networking, chemistry, and physics. For those who enjoy math, there are many careers in applied mathematics. Graduates with degrees in math are in high demand in a variety of fields.

Computer Graphics and Animation

Many positions in computer graphics involve calculus and linear algebra. To create computer generated dinosaurs and other types of animation a strong foundation is needed in advanced calculus, projective geometry, and differential geometry. Algorithms for computer animation use techniques from scientific computation, statistics, linear algebra, signal processing, control theory, and computational geometry.

Engineers with good math skills are needed to make web pages which can support three-dimensional objects with motion, shading, and other advanced elements.

Operations Research

Operations research includes the application of math for problems of optimization, especially for complex problems and particularly in the field of business. This discipline is also known as management science and industrial engineering.

Internet Businesses

Some major Internet companies hire mathematics graduates. Researchers at Amazon.com and many other companies put together mathematical models of customers and employees. For example, some modules are designed to predict what type of music people will purchase. Yahoo hires mathematicians to work with an enormous pool of data which includes the online activities of millions of registered customers.

Some companies use math to analyze online marketing trends. Those with math skills provide program managers and editors with sophisticated statistical models which provide information such as what types of TV scenes appeal most to certain demographic groups.

Network Security

The cryptology utilized in network security uses mathematical algorithms. Many positions in this field require a high level of mathematical ability.

Finance

Financial mathematics has been described as the development of mathematical tools and computational models for use in the financial industry. These tools and models are used to price new securities, support investment decisions, select portfolios, and manage risk. Mathematics is used on Wall Street for financial derivatives and stock market analysis. Many traders involved with stocks, commodities, and foreign exchange have math degrees.

Government Jobs

Many government jobs with Argonne, Sandia and Oak Ridge National Labs, the Jet Propulsion Lab, NASA, the Department of Agriculture, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology are in the applied mathematics category. Also, some jobs at the National Security Agency are in applied math and some positions are pure mathematics.

Science Careers

The up-and-coming field of biomathematics includes the application of concepts from a wide range of biological fields such as genomics and neuroscience. Bioinformatics (computational biology) is a growing part of the biomathematics field. Biostatistics and epidemiology use a great deal of applied statistics. Epidemiologists study the spread of disease and model how to respond to epidemics.

Data Mining

Data mining involves discovering patterns and previously unknown information in large data sets. Job opportunities are found in fields such as forensics, security, bioinformatics, genomics, e-commerce, medicine, astrophysics, and chemical and electrical power engineering.

Climatology

The field of climatology simulates the component forces that drive the climate. They use sophisticated models, based on physical principles, expressed as complicated partial differential equations. High performance computers are used in this field.

People with good math skills have a variety of careers to choose from. College mathematics courses and degrees are highly beneficial in obtaining a rewarding job. (I like the first sentence but still doubt with the second sentence. hehe)

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