$1 + $1 = £²
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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You get picked up as a pet project by the Financial Engineering Professor at your college who teaches you a lot of statistical wizardry and sthochastic calculus and grooms you to become his newest and greatest quant he can brag to his Wallstreet buddies about. They have already seen your projects with the professor, the interview is pomp.
You make 2M your first year and are making well over 10M by your fifth year. You work 80+ hours a week, making some other people very, very rich. After a decade you are very burnt out and wondered why you ever wanted to do this in the first place. You quit your ridiculously high paying job at your hedge or whatever fund and move to upstate NY to get your teaching credentials and then go teach maths to high school students who will ask "when will this ever be useful" and you smile in your quietude over the whifs of the coffee in your thermos as the students finish the pop quiz of the day.
That's what mathematicians do in my experience.
congrats on being rich af
I feel like Vince Gilligan wrote this
My son has a math degree and does computer programming.
Years ago one of my old military bosses had a math degree, he did stuff for national security. Secret secret stuff. I assumed it was all codes and decoding.
I knew two mathematicians, both worked at NASA. Met one coaching dance (side job) and one gymnastics (his retirement job). I'm not entirely sure what they did exactly, beyond "math".
I got offered a job at NASA. It was very tempting, primarily because I would have gotten to see space maneuvers.
However, they had no WFH openings and the department that was offering me a position was only using technologies with which I was already familiar. Unfortunately I had to decline.
Finance industry.
Danny Moses: You're completely sure of the math?
Jared Vennett: Look at him, that's my quant.
Mark Baum: Your what?
Jared Vennett: My quantitative. My math specialist. Look at him, you notice anything different about him? Look at his face.
Mark Baum: That's pretty racist.
Jared Vennett: Look at his eyes, I'll give you a hint, his name is Yang. He won a national math competition in China! HE DOESN'T EVEN SPEAK ENGLISH! Yeah I'm sure of the math.
You out math people who have money so they give money to you.
The trick is you make it a complex black box so that no one knows how it works. See debt derivative models.
You do math
Woah slow down.
I assume you mean ppl who literally have "mathematician" as a job title? A few I could think of...
- I'd guess most likely as an academic researcher. There are academics in just about any field you could imagine, a lot of which are even more abstract/"useless" than advanced math. Not a traditional "job" in the sense that academics don't directly add value to the economy... but are paid to do research that hopefully other people can add value based on. Downside is that these job openings are insanely competitive especially for the aforementioned "less useful" fields, because they are based on an organization having spare money to support research...
- As a cybersecurity researcher maybe? A lot of modern-day cybersecurity (the original "crypto", before it became associated with bitcoin) are based on advanced math, so I'd imagine such expertise is still needed
- Somewhere in finance maybe? A lot of modern-day finance are built on data science/statistics, although I suppose this job fits statisticians better...
Applied math works everywhere, from engineering, to public health, finance, logistics, insurance...
It's similar to how there are witches on Etsy that you can buy spells from. A customer goes on Etsy and pays a mathematician to do a love sum, or a death calculation, or a good luck multiplication.
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Well basically, people pay you to do math.
Hope that helped
Finance, there's a whole lot of arcane statistics underlying risk management.
Tech, the bleeding edge of computer science is really just applied math.
So the 6' 4" guy in finance is just a tall math whiz?
I thought applied math was just buying a silly amount of apples...
I'm pretty sure your job title isn't "Mathematician" though. You're a "risk analyst" or "quantitative analyst" or something. You're also not doing pure math, you're using somewhat advanced applied mathematical processes to model financial information. Just like how a rocket engineer isn't a physicist but may have a background in physics.
some of them, especially in cryptography, are definitely just straight up mathematicians
Data analysis, data science, teaching, statistician, coding, finance and stocks
I had a math teacher once tell a joke:
What's the difference between a mathematician and a large pizza?
A large pizza can feed a family of 4.
Although he was a teacher, so he was making alright money I think. But he also looked like Billy Corgan and was a ninja (well at least some degree of black belt).
- Teaching
- Research jobs
- Tech
- Wall Street shit
- Accounting
- Loss protection such as fraud prevention or forensic accountiing
- Sell dime bags outside your local convenience store
- stripping
- painting houses
- carpentry
- day laborer's
- pouring concrete.
You work somewhere that can afford to pay you. Physics labs helping research. Universities doing theoretical work. Or you teach.
Those are pretty much it.
Im an electrician so dont expect more insight from me
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Maths is the cornerstone of engineering and science. It's probably one of the most versatile skills. Add physics and you have a control/electrical engineer. Add computer science and you have a programmer. Add economics and you have an equity trader. Maths alone has huge scope in research.
Earning my ways with programming almost anything on anything for 40 years, let me tell you that a) I've never needed anything I learned in my universities math courses, and b) mathematicians make horrible programmers because they might know the theory, but often lack on the real programming side.
I suppose it depends what the program is for. If it's UX then probably not a lot of use to know advanced maths. I was thinking about the process of creating mathematical models of physical systems and embedding them in an ECU or creating encryption schemes or deriving models from large datasets. Maths trains us to think logically. Computers are fundamentally logical and must strictly obey mathematical rules if we want answers.
I call bullshit.
If you were coding in the 80's i have hard time beliving you did not use math in Pascal or COBOL. And i remember needing lots of math with anything 3d in 2000
Also you cant state all mathematicians make horrible programmers because they often lack the "real programming side". Its not a boolean. They might be bad coders because they are bad at coding, not because they are mathematics. Its like saying all painters are bad writers. Both coding and math have a lot of overlapping qualitities and people who understand other have easier time learning other, but it does not mean they are inherently good or bad in the other one.
I've never needed anything I learned in my universities math courses
You've been inverting matrices left and right. You just didn't realise.
That's not university level.
It is.
Inverting a matrix is undergraduate level, particularly the advanced algorithms.
Also the reasons why you need to invert a matrix are taught at university, not high school.
Tell this to my math teacher. On the other hand, school here is a bit tougher than in the US.
Well, if you are already doing LU decomposition then I'm impressed.
What does a mathematician do?
My guess would be maths.
Yes, of course. But what math? For who? In what setting?
Pure mathematicians often answer questions that really only other pure mathematicians care about, but occasionally their results or techniques have relevance in other fields, so universities will pay them to work on this stuff and publish papers. Usually part of the job is applying for grants to fund your research and teaching students.
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Depends on which kind of mathematician you ask for, can he utilize said math in engineering, for example, or does he only know pure math?
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