Can a mathematician make a good career and living?

Wall Street loves math as well and pays very well. Actuaries are also well paid mathematicians. There are also related fields where you use math like computer science and engineering.

Engineer, you left out the NSA. I have heard that the NSA grabs almost 20% of all freshly minted PhD mathemiticians. Pattern recognition, game theory, and data mining is as an important function of 'spooks' as it is to Wall Street.

Rap

Heck yeah, probably need a PHD, but you could work in Finance, Insurance or Business. Do some research in actuarial science.

As for salary probably 90k+

Yes, if you are very good at math there are lots of very good, high paying, jobs that are open to you.

And the future is even better for you. More and more jobs require math as we become dependent on information technology.

Define "very good".

In my off hours this summer I took an unpaid job at a political campaign, and was surrounded every one of those 300 hours by brilliantly witty, college-aged women* from the top liberal arts schools in the country. At no point in the campaign did I miss Artinian ring theory.

You're a programmer, Max. Perhaps, you can answer this: how many female project managers are there per hundred people in the area of, say, legacy code programming?


*--I'm not much older myself, so hold the "lech" comments, please, y'all.

I hate to crimp the style of those Goldman Sachs quants, boon to society that some think them, but that is a love affair that needs to stop.

(OTOH, any world with risk in it will need actuaries.)

I don't understand your question. Are you really saying that women can't be software engineers? Because that clearly isn't true.

There are many different jobs in software engineering that are mathematical. The most advanced, best paying jobs are developing new technology in the most cutting edge fields. These cutting edge fields change from decade to decade, but right now they include fields like speech recognition, image processing and robotic vision.

The women and men running projects (I am talking about chief scientists, not project managers) in these fields usually have PhD's and a very deep understanding of mathematics. These jobs make easily $150,000 - $300,000 and up and require advanced mathematics daily. Under them are group of experienced research programmers doing a lot of the design and implementation. They can make $70,000 - $150,000 a year.

Of course there are lots of other types of jobs in software from upper level developers and software architects to lower level programmers to web designers etc. These are still well paying ($50,000 - $100,000 is typical for any of these technical positions with some experience). But if you love mathematics and want to go into software engineering, you really should be in a research position.

Project managers are not the same thing as programmers (and project management does not require the advanced understanding of math that many software engineering positions require). Project managers have to be good at organization and schedules and at getting people to talk to each other. I wouldn't recommend project management as a career to the original poster who says she wants a career in mathematics.

Gender doesn't matter. A couple of years ago I worked for a woman; a brilliant scientist in the field of speech recognition. Although there are more male software engineers than female right now (this is changing), if you are talented and educated you can do very well in engineering.

The turtle has turned.



Amiss cliches are like a red rag to a bull to me but don't let me cramp yer style. Is the silent w in quant outspoken in place of the missing b in banker. And does the risk premium only exceed the actuarial risk by the amount of the gleaming palace.

That's not what I was saying.

I was just thinking of becoming a software engineer myself, but I'd heard there weren't many women in the business. I like working for women much more than I like working for men (nothing personal, dude) so the percentage of project managers who are female matters to me a great deal.

I think the demographics of an industry are something to seriously consider before committing to an industry, which is what makes my comment relevant to the thread. I knew a nurse who disliked that her profession had so many women in it, and would have preferred more balance. I take the same view of professions that are male-dominated.

At least three of the young women I worked for this summer would have made excellent software engineers, yet the career path never would occurred to them as an option -- so bent were they on bringing about political change in our sick world. (On a side note, I still belong to the firefly camp on the question of why there aren't more women in STEM.)

If everyone thinks like this, there will never be more women in engineering. I think that is a shame. I think that is a shame.

I have had two female managers in my software career (as a male software engineer). The gender of my boss is no big deal. These types of high level engineering jobs come with very professional work environments. People conduct themselves professionally.

If you are worried about gender, it is going to hold you back. Personally I hope people worry less, particularly in STEM careers.