Career Options

What do mathematicians do?

• Insurance companies hire large numbers of mathematicians on actuarial and other analyst positions.
• Quantitative Finance and Financial Engineering is another big pool of opportunities which involves fairly deep mathematical concepts.
• Operations Researchers help organizations, businesses, and government find efficient solutions to organizational and strategic planning questions, including scheduling and distribution problems, resource allocation, facilities design, and forecasting.
• Mathematicians are frequently employed in Information Technology positions. In fact, a recent survey from the UK shows that while a substantial number of mathematicians work in IT, few computer scientists compete with mathematicians in any of the other fields of employment. In particular, mathematical knowledge is required for work in information security and cryptography.
• Statisticians are employed by large organizations and work in research and development divisions from academica to industry to analyze data from surveys and experiments.
• Educationis a wide field of employment ranging from secondary school teachers to university professors.
• Engineering Mathematics offers job opportunities from aerospace engineering and petroleum engineering to a wide range of other engineering disciplines.
• Last, but not least, a career as a research mathematician at universities or mathematics research institutes.

Mathematics career links

• Why are mathematicians so much in demand in the job market – career advise presentation by a financial entrepreneur.
• Maths Careers – excellent mathematics career website by The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications
• Career Information by the American Mathematical Society.
• Profiles of Professional Mathematicians and Computational Scientists by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
• Occupational Outlook Handbook – Mathematics by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Career advice for research mathematicians by Terence Tao.