
When Will I Use Math? - acangiano
http://math-blog.com/2011/05/21/when-will-i-use-math/
======
jedbrown
I solve partial differential equations on parallel computers. This is a key
competitive advantage for many industrial applications including aerospace,
reservoir, reactor, and data center design. It is also crucial for medical
applications, climate, and many disciplines of computational physics. There
are nowhere near enough qualified people in this field. If you are qualified,
you can more-or-less have your pick of jobs anywhere in the world.

I use every mathematics and physics course I took until part way into my
undergraduate studies on a daily basis. In contrast, I believe that I have
never had an English course that improved my writing (they emphasized the
wrong things for technical writing). Indeed, it would be difficult to find a
single thing I learned in any course outside of the hard sciences that has
ever added value to my contributions.

It is a disservice to people going into fields like biology or social sciences
to pretend that mathematics does not play a pivotal role. Many, perhaps most,
professional grade tasks in those fields involve designing studies to test a
hypothesis or quantify an effect. This requires statistics, and not just an
introduction. In the state I grew up in, Fish and Wildlife had one
biometrician. He was a coauthor on every paper published by biologists any
office in the state because he was needed to design the study appropriately
and analyze the results. With one exception: my father has a Masters in
biology, but his coursework was primarily in statistics, and he can design his
own studies. Just barely, it still takes a significant amount of reading for
each study.

Math matters.

~~~
kd0amg
_I use every mathematics and physics course I took until part way into my
undergraduate studies on a daily basis._

I think this highlights an issue I have with the meme that with a major in
math, you can do anything. What you can do with a math degree still depends on
what you learn aside from pure math (essentially domain knowledge), be it in
elective coursework or on your own. "You can be a physicist"? Yes, I could if
I'd studied physics more. I would strongly advise other math majors to take a
minor or a second major (my other major was CS, where the math background
definitely helps, and it would be nice to have even more).

~~~
mturmon
This is an insightful comment.

My first-order take had been that the lucrative jobs that the video advertises
are plentiful only if the "math person" is also proficient at some type of
computing. Reason is, I've known a lot of mathematically talented people who
are not able to compete for these kind of jobs because they have no sense of
how to compute with their abstractions.

But I think your idea captures the problem with the video better than the
simplistic "lack of computing expertise" does. The budding "math person" that
the video targets could do quite well at, say, a biological or finance
application, even without being computer-savvy, just by acquiring expertise in
these areas.

------
exch
It's shame that in the entire video, not one concrete example was given about
the application of math in a real world profession.

It's mostly just "Yes, math is cool! You can do so much with it!". This is
what my teachers always kept telling me, but it never registered because it
was presented in a very abstract and meaningless way.

What would have convinced me was concrete applications. Something as simple as
defining and understanding the algorithms required to make a simple Pong game
work. That would have inspired me.

~~~
nkassis
Yeah that's how I felt about the whole video but I think this is just the
introduction. Maybe the future videos will show people at work. They could
talk to a video game programmer who takes them throught the process of
displaying an object in a 3D space (no code just the idea) and show them it's
pretty much the stuff they are learning right now but more advanced. Then
interview a carpenter, the carpenters I know do a lot of calculations during a
day. It can be considered low level math but I think the point should be to
show that there is no safe place from math ;p

~~~
biot
If they hope to reach out to people and interest them in math and how
practical it is, then not showing examples of this does a disservice to their
goal.

It's like playing World of Warcraft for me... I find it incredibly boring to
play a game where the majority of what you do is "Gather/Hunt/Mine X units of
Y and take it to Z". My friends who are into it say "Yes, but that's just the
beginning... the real fun starts at level 60+". That may be true, but I'm
unwilling to torture myself through months of "gameplay" just to see if at
level 60+ I still find it fun.

If it's not interesting from the beginning, what are the odds most people will
stick around?

------
zeteo
I think the question is badly formulated. "When" will you use math implies
that, no matter what, you will end up using it. This is simply not true. The
vast majority of jobs out there, from flipping burgers to fixing toilets,
involve nothing except the most basic arithmetic.

I think a much better answer is: _if_ you learn math, you will have plenty of
opportunity to use it. It's the only way to become qualified for some very
good kinds of jobs.

~~~
stcredzero
_The vast majority of jobs out there, from flipping burgers to fixing toilets,
involve nothing except the most basic arithmetic._

I remember working as a busboy in a diner in Alaska in the early 90's and
applying queueing theory and Little's Law. Miraculously, I efficiently had
tables ready for the waitresses when they needed them, and they liked me for
this and gave me great tips.

A girlfriend of mine told me about doing the same sorts of optimizations
intuitively while working as a take-out order taker at McDonalds. Her manager
loved her, because she always cleared out the queue quickly. She later went on
to medical school and is now a doctor.

I also remember trying to order from a McDonald's some years later on a road
trip and noting that everyone behind the counter was consistently waiting 2 or
3 on line on the same station. It took me a full 15 minutes to get my order!

If you want to see the result of people being sheep and losing out because
they aren't applying such knowledge, just go and take a drive during a busy
time on a Houston freeway when people are merging and taking offramps. People
consistently make the worst choice. A small minority do egregiously bad
things.

~~~
zeteo
I should have been more clear and said "require" instead of "involve". Yes,
math can improve almost anything, but you can do an acceptable job at McD with
no math knowledge. Still, it's a McD job, and if you had learnt some math then
you could have found something a lot better.

~~~
stcredzero
_Yes, math can improve almost anything, but you can do an acceptable job at
McD with no math knowledge._

The optimally suboptimal queueing at that one place was _not acceptable!_
Still, as my ex demonstrated, you can manage the same optimality at that job
just be being observant and using common sense. The human brain is a pretty
powerful general optimizer. Math is most useful in situations where data is
not so accessible to a casual observer. The problem in those situations, is
that the optimization itself then becomes harder to
observe/explain/comprehend. There is a similar problem in large enterprises
with automated testing and refactoring.

 _Still, it's a McD job, and if you had learnt some math then you could have
found something a lot better._

Well, in Homer Alaska at the time, from my vantage point, it would've been
some more machismo so the right person would give me a job as a forklift
driver, some cooking experience, so I could get a job doing that, or maybe
some more muscle -- all those would've done a lot more to get me a higher
paying job than math.

~~~
zeteo
"some more machismo [...], some cooking experience [...] or maybe some more
muscle -- all those would've done a lot more to get me a higher paying job
than math."

In the short run.

~~~
stcredzero
Well, for that, I had the prospect of saving enough money from the diner
busboy job so that I could drive back to the lower 48 and grad school.

------
tokenadult
Some clear, strong answers to the question in written form,

ftp://math.stanford.edu/pub/papers/milgram/milgram-msri.pdf

with a lot of interesting information about mathematics education.

(Hacker News may not style this URL as a link, but I've been there and it
works.)

~~~
mathgladiator
That's a great find. The first quote I feel directly related to the Software
Dev explosion since it is so hard to find a good programmer. I feel the reason
is deeply rooted in sucky education, and a lack of mentors.

------
Mgccl
I usually refer people to read What Is Mathematics For? published on the
Notices of AMS. <http://www.ams.org/notices/201005/rtx100500608p.pdf> In
short, most people will not use math more advanced than arithmetic, unless
they are mathematicians/physicists.

------
fbnt
I remember asking this very same question to my Math teacher when I was 12,
during middle school.

She paused 5 seconds and then replied: "It's exercise for your brain, it makes
it more _elastic!_ ".

Eventually, I became an engineer (and learned the hard way why math matters),
but I really hope she dosen't teach anymore.

------
georgefox
The only thing I took away from this that wasn't really vague is that you can
make money if you have a math degree. As someone who has been tempted to study
mathematics but not for the purpose of making money, this is the opposite of
what I was looking for.

------
icegreentea
Not exactly job related but... Just today while talking to my girlfriend about
making plushies, we stumbled on the question of how to make ball plushies.
Upon realization that you get cones from flat sheets by cutting a triangular
wedge, resulting in a cylinder's whose radius changes at a constant rate (and
therefore a cone), we realized to get a dome, we would just have to get a
wedge who's sides have the right curve (we're still working it out... got
kinda distracted, intuitively feels like a tan or something).

Math pops up in the darnest places (queue Donald Duck in Mathemagical Land).

~~~
stcredzero
A friend of mine once did the calculus to create his own juggling ball
pattern. What he found is that there are all sorts of factors (like the
changing stretchiness of the cloth versus direction and details of doing the
stitches) that were too hard to calculate, which left lots of room for
engineering. (Making a lot of examples, and tweaking the design.)

------
sliverstorm
This seems to be an organization rather than just a one-shot video. Does HN
perhaps want to distill it's criticisms and suggestions and forward them to
weusemath.com to try and actually be helpful? The goal is certainly laudable.

------
more_original
I think using maths isn't about applying equations that one has learned, or
something like that.

Learning maths changes the way one thinks. But the benefit of this is very
hard to explain to someone who doesn't know.

------
rflrob
This video would be a lot stronger if they had only 1 or 2 academics out of
the dozen or so people, rather than the opposite ratio.

------
NY_USA_Hacker
Q. "When will I use math?"

A. In business, whenever you can find a use and start a company to pursue it.

Note:

(1) I know some math: My Ph.D. dissertation was on the applied math of
stochastic optimal control. The work was advanced enough mathematically to
address measurable selection, solved a real problem, and made some
contributions to making such calculations faster.

(2) I'm pursuing a use of math in business. My current work is an information
technology startup based on a Web site. The key to the promise of the work is
some original math I did based on some advanced prerequisites.

So, I know something about applications of math.

Jobs? Early in my career, I knew some computing, was at GE which was shrinking
(again) in computing, sent some resume copies, and in two weeks got seven
interviews and five offers. The computing worked for a job.

Broadly the video is nonsense, contemptible, deceptive, misleading, badly
supported nonsense. Students need to be warned.

Wall Street? In graduate school, Wall Street was one of the career directions
I had in mind. So, I got a relatively good background in stochastic processes.
Later I wrote Fisher Black (as in the Black-Scholes option pricing model) at
Goldman Sachs and got a nice letter back saying that he saw no opportunities
to apply math on Wall Street.

I interviewed in computing at Morgan Stanley, showed some nice applied math
I'd done, and mentioned that I wanted to work on automatic trading but got no
interest.

I got a call from Google, and they wanted only C++ programming.

I got a call from Microsoft and explained some work I'd done, and published,
that would help Microsoft but never got past the first 'phone-screen' girl.

Early in my career, there was some interest in applied math, but this interest
was essentially only for work paid for by the US DoD and for the Cold War. The
US DoD has done a lot of good applied math, but those successes have had
essentially zero influence in business.

Can look at the Web sites of 500+ US venture capital firms, nearly all in
Silicon Valley, near Boston, or in New York City, look at their investment
interests, and never see the words math or mathematics. Chris Sacca dropped
out of a math Ph.D. program and may have the best background in math of any
venture partner in the US. His biography may have the only mention of math on
a venture firm Web site.

The interest of math in information technology venture capital is somewhere
between zero and deeply negative. E.g., I got back from Ron Conway's son at
Andreessen Horowitz

"your company is outside our area of expertise".

By "expertise" he had to mean the math, not the Web site.

Yes, in topics central to Hacker News, there should be interest in math for
'machine learning, data mining, big data, ad targeting' etc., but there is
not. Instead, the world would rather stumble along with intuitive approaches
to these topics instead of solid (powerful, valuable) math approaches.

Here's the main point: In business, the US is still organized mostly like the
factory floor of 100 years ago where the supervisor knew more and the
subordinate was there just to apply muscle to the ideas of the supervisor. And
that 'inequality in technical knowledge' continues all the way to the CEO and
COB who want to believe that they know the most.

So, no one in middle management wants to bet their budget or career record on
some project using some math they don't understand; they don't get bad marks
for such projects they do not pursue.

Essentially only a CEO could sponsor a project with some significant math, and
CEOs rarely sponsor projects directly.

In venture funded information technology entrepreneurship, the 'technology' is
supposed to be just routine software that could be understood by a bright,
self-taught middle school hacker and, thus, can safely be ignored as crucial
'intellectual property' by any Ivy League history major, Harvard MBA venture
partner.

Broadly, bringing high technical expertise as an employee to a business is a
fool's errand. Yes, there are a few exceptions, e.g., some technical topic
deep in the CIO's organization, but generally the employee is supposed to know
less, not more.

An employee who, on the side or whatever, starts a good project based on math
will find that their management doesn't like the project. If the employee
proposes the project more broadly, then they will be told not to communicate
outside of their management chain or face getting fired.

Once as a professor, hired in optimization, I wrote a research paper in
optimization based on some math, with theorems and proofs. My department
reviewed the paper and concluded that it was "not publishable". It published
right away, without significant revision in the 'Journal of Optimization
Theory and Applications'. At Yorktown Heights, we were doing some work in
server farm and network monitoring of health and wellness using artificial
intelligence. I found a much more powerful approach with some original work
using some advanced topics in stochastic processes, and the lab concluded that
the work was "not publishable". The work published right away without
significant revision in 'Information Sciences'. The reason: The people I was
working for didn't know math and didn't like it.

Really, if math is to have a significant role in a business, then the main
mathematician has to be the founder, CEO of the business, e.g., Jim Simons,
Andrew Viterbi. Otherwise, f'get about it.

Broadly, math is by far the most exacting and difficult academic subject, is
rarely pursued by students beyond what is needed for K-12 teaching, physics,
engineering, or basic statistics, and is just not known, liked, wanted, or
even tolerated in society more broadly.

For a good career, mostly an electrician's license is a better foundation than
a Ph.D. in math, electrical engineering, or anything else.

My view is that math is by a wide margin the most powerful and valuable topic
for the future of information technology entrepreneurship for at least the
first half of this century, but to make this promise real the mathematician
has to be the founder, CEO of the company, and the math will not be an
advantage in seeking equity funding.

To make this promise understood, about the best I can do is be successful
financially, buy a yacht over 200' long, and give some interviews on the yacht
cruising in Long Island Sound.

Broadly our society does not value, want, like, or tolerate math.

~~~
tokenadult
_My view is that math is by a wide margin the most powerful and valuable topic
for the future of information technology entrepreneurship for at least the
first half of this century, but to make this promise real the mathematician
has to be the founder, CEO of the company, and the math will not be an
advantage in seeking equity funding._

An interesting comment. I wonder if the YC funding process is at all an
exception, a funding process in which mathematics background might be an
advantage.

~~~
NY_USA_Hacker
Some of the qualifications of some of the YC partners are exceptional for
venture partners: You might be correct.

But, to add a little detail, it appears that information technology (biotech
might be significantly different) venture funding has been reduced to a large
font on one side of a 3 x 5" index card: For a seed round, see a demo of the
software. For a Series A, see 'traction', that is users and revenue both
growing quickly. For a Series B, see good accounting numbers. For a Series C,
are basically just buying part of an on-going company. Could teach a dog that
3 x 5" card in a weekend.

The Series A criteria are so uniform that my guess is that they are
'suggested' by some of the more important LPs.

But, for anyone with a serious background in math, science, or engineering,
(information technology) venture funding is a shock because, if only as a
special case of the 3 x 5" card, the partners will essentially never take
seriously a technical review of the project on paper. This is a shock because
essentially all serious work in math, science, and engineering is done just on
paper, not with prototypes or 'market ready' products.

My joke about venture capital is that they would have said, "You build and
test one and get one more ready for delivery, and we will buy half the gas for
the Enola Gay".

But the bomb was a big waste of money? The bomb cost about $3 billion in 1940s
money (see Richard Rhodes), and that's $3000 for each of the 1 million US
soldiers that might have been killed or injured in an invasion of the home
islands of Japan, that is, a grand bargain just as money.

So, (information technology) venture capital just won't judge based on looking
in detail at the core 'secret sauce' intellectual property and, in particular,
won't consider math.

So, if the math helps with the traction or accounting numbers, then fine. The
entrepreneur can tell the equity funders that the project is just 'software'
and otherwise keep what is crucial in the secret sauce just between his own
ears. If he has an algorithm that shows P = NP (not what I have) and is
blazingly fast on the full range of NP-complete problems, then don't tell
anyone and just let the software run and do logistics, manufacturing
scheduling, etc.

In my project, the math is the crucial work and the main promise of a valuable
company quite beyond just some Series A 'traction' numbers. But the only
person in business who can see this promise now is me, and this is at least a
surprise.

In the end, for me, now, that the venture partners will ignore or just hate
the math is no longer very relevant: I have the math and the corresponding
software long since done, and it was fairly easy given my background. The rest
is just routine programming. Since I'm using Windows, .NET, ASP.NET, and
ADO.NET, I've had to learn those topics. This learning has been routine but
slow. But a few more Web pages, and the software will be ready for at least
first production. Then get and load some good initial 'base data', and I will
be able to go live. If the project is good, then there will be good 'traction'
numbers. Then I could raise a Series A, but if the project is good soon it
should throw off enough cash that I won't t need a Series A. If I get a good
business without equity funding, then the venture partners won't be part of it
because they refused to evaluate the real promise, the math, and waited until
the business was so far along it didn't need equity funding.

Then, just why would I want a Board that hated math?

Net, for this thread, for an information technology entrepreneur, the math
just has to be something the entrepreneur keeps between his ears, and that is
a piss poor career direction to recommend to young people.

------
klbarry
This video is completely worthless for the people they claim to be targeting,
the average student. It literally doesn't talk about where math is used in the
real world in any meaningful terms to a highschooler.

~~~
tibbon
Right, a student is thinking, "WTF is this quadratic formula for?" might not
have gotten much from this. This shows the benefits of the end-game, not the
middle point. Bridging that gap for students I think is the hard part.

~~~
daeken
I learned the quadratic formula in algebra II (the highest math class I've
taken) and promptly forgot it. Then a year or so later, I was writing a
raytracer and realized that the ray-sphere intersection is just the quadratic
formula. I couldn't help but wonder why we weren't given a _single_ use case
for it in school.

~~~
tibbon
The only reason I can imagine is that most use cases require other specific
knowledge that will also seem like useless stuff to 99% of the students and
its hard to find a use case that fits most of their probably interests.

"So in the future, when you're writing a ray tracer..." just doesn't ring with
most students anymore than the word problems that required the formula either.

