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Mathematics Skills More in Demand Than Ever
knownsense writes "Business week has a nice article (feel good, low on detail, vague numbers) on the rise of maths and mathematicians in a world that is increasingly obsessed with statistics, advertising, search engines, and algorithms. The article also deals with issues of privacy. How has mathematics, statistics and other number driven aspects of life impacted you in the last decade?"
We all know that advancements in technology can cost people their jobs. However, in the case of the building industry in Texas, the effect of introducing new technology can often be somewhat delayed.
...sigh...
Back in 1997, my new house was in the slow process of changing from plans on paper into bricks on concrete. One of the tasks that has to be done early on is to lay out the shape of the house accurately onto the land. My builder uses a sub-contractor to do that - and I had occasion to watch him work. He arrived in a beat up old pickup truck with four 'migrant workers' sitting in the back. In order to lay out the initial 'bounding rectangle' of the building, they follow this algorithm:
* Measure a baseline for the long edge of the rectangle. Mark it with two stakes hammered into the ground and tie a length of nylon string between them.
* Tie a second piece of string to one of the stakes and measure out the width of the rectangle along it. Eyeball the angle between the new edge and the baseline so it's roughly 90 degrees and you have an 'L' shape. One guy holds the string there.
* Do the same at the other end of the baseline. Now you have a 'U' shape and two guys are holding the open ends of the strings.
* Take a third piece of string - equal in length to the length of the rectangle. Give one end to each of the two guys who are already holding string. 'jiggle' them until all three strings are tight. You now have a parallelogram made of string, staked out at two corners.
* Now take two long tape measures and with one guy standing at each corner of our parallelogram, position the tape measures along the two diagonals of the parallelogram. With two guys holding the tapes on the baseline stakes and the other two holding onto the strings and shouting out the lengths of the diagonals, they jiggle the two free points until all of the strings are tight and the two diagonals tape measures are reading the same lengths. This requires a lot of shouting, cursing and everyone telling everyone else which way to move.
* Now they have a rectangle - so they bash in two more stakes and then level the whole thing with a really impressive-looking laser contraption.
Well, I watched this with some amusement - and asked why they didn't just calculate the length of the diagonal. The boss guy said that you couldn't do that - "It's impossible". I told him about Pythagoras' theorem. With the aid of a calculator (he didn't know what that funny 'square-root' key was for), I was able to show him how easy it is to calculate the length of the diagonal and do away with all the ugly 'jiggling'.
"Wow!" he said. Then he thought for a moment - "Now I'll only need three guys to hold the string!"...and fired one of them on the spot! I thought he was kidding - but the next day when they were measuring out the place for the garage, there was one less guy holding the string.
So, a 2,500 year old technological advance cost some poor guy his job.
www.sjbaker.org
"We'll have systems that tap our knowledge by the minute," [Pierre Haren] says. "Productivity could rise by a factor of 10."
:)
That's nice, but which factor? 1 is a factor of 10
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Mathematics - ematic = Maths
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
How has mathematics, statistics and other number driven aspects of life impacted you in the last decade?
It hasn't gotten me laid yet.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
They always advertise it as a field, and sure it's interesting, but as a job, to be a mathematician you're typically in a position where you are a tool for the non-mathematician's. Of course the non-math's want more math's to do the work for them and tell them what to do... but is it a good carreer?
How has mathematics, statistics and other number driven aspects of life impacted you in the last decade?
It made me go made hairline recede like crazy as I studied calculus in school and at college.
The technique in this article is actually used, too, and can be used on different levels. That is, the BW article says this company uses it to measure the distance between two articles, but you can use it to compare the distance between two words. Here's how.
Let's say you have some corpus with N distinct words in it. For each word w you create a "context vector" vw of length 2N. In the first N positions there are counts for the number of time each word in the corpus appears immediately to the left of the word w, and for the second N positions there are counts of the same for the right context. The angle between any two vectors in this 2N-dimensional vector space produces a measure of the distance between the two words. If you use some kind of dimensionality reduction technique to get a 2-dimensional representation, you can see that although this technique is pretty crude linguistically speaking it does pretty well. Each language has a distinct "shape" in this regard, with similar words grouped together, i.e., in English there might be a cluster of points consisting of "singular nouns," or specific parts of speech, like prepositions. It can sometimes even group words by semantic domain, depending on your corpus.
Remember kids, computational linguistics is fun!
Article is missing the most important part....
is it 2x more? 3x more? Maybe 5(log n)x^2 more? sin(cos(log (pi) * -1/2)) + e? More importantly, how much has the standard deviation moved from previous years to this one?
It's just unfortunate that so few people do have an understanding of statistics. I've lost count of the newspaper stories, even years-long media-fuelled "controversies"-, which are based entirely on misunderstood, misrepresented, or malformed statistics. "How to Lie with Statistics" should be required reading in high school.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
statistics, advertising, search engines, and algorithms.
and Texas Hold'em.
I can't imagine how many more kids would learn math and be good at it if it weren't for the whole "math is hard and dumb" attitude of the general public in the USA. I don't think kids go into math thinking it's all that hard, but teachers even tell them it is. When that kid goes home, his parents tell him it is. The media makes math "stupid" and even in cartoons, portrays people that are good at it as social outcasts. How is this helping us in any way? I think the best advance that Math could take is to achieve a positive image in society. If that happened, then its advancements in science could only increase faster.
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I would like to know if there is a way to make money out of maths skills, as a freelancer.
I mean, I have a phd and I'm quite good at maths, having solved the 3 problems who where thrown at me in 1 year and a half (instead of the regular 3 years) but what I would like to do is :
solve mathematical problems/bring solutions to people/firms in exchange for hard coin.
Kind like a mathematician freelancer/mercenary : You do the job, you get the money and that's it.
I mean, there are web sites for freelancer artists/web developer/coder. But there isn't one for mathematicians.
So, the only way to make money out of maths (in france) is either to teach it or to research in an university. Either way, you are a salary man.
Man, that sucks.
What is the use for those monsters maths skills, that I patiently honed all these years if I can't even make a little cash out of it/or make more money out of it that the average teacher (that really sucks at research/high lvl maths) ?
When I tell a potential employer I know Galois theory, he stares at me for a few seconds, and then asks me "Do you know how to use Excel?". To which I reply that I prefer Mathemathica and rarely touch Microsoft products. Then the interview is over.
When I tell a girl I admire her Riemannesque topology and say her virtues are greater in number than those of the girls of Lesbos combined and raised to the googoolth power, she says: "Dude, you are such a sweetie, but I have to go now".
When I tell my neighbor he can make his wine cellar temperature independent by putting it y meters below the ground, he says "Well, aren't you a smarty, boy!", grins, and then returns home to put on the missis.
Math majors from top schools are being recruited (along with other hard sciences, physics and CS) by banks, hedge funds, etc. and getting 6 figures right out of college. No kidding. The story is, about a decade or so ago, some hedge funds decided to try letting some really smart people (i.e. math majors from top schools) handle money. They did so well, they made a fortune and it turned the industry upside-down. Well, that might be an exaggeration, but it's more or less true.
Markets had a number of pricing inconsistencies, etc. in them, and these smart mathy people figured out how to take advantage of them. Lots of algorithms and computer programming found application to managing these hedge funds. To correct for these abuses, the markets had to close the gaps and inconsistencies these hedge funds were abusing.
Although a lot of the market problems have since been cleaned up, a lot of math is going into managing funds to maximize profit. There aren't as many people making millions off of just trading, but there's a lot of jobs in the financial industry for smart math people that still pay extremely well.
The financial industry learned its lesson: math is incredibly useful. This has already been obvious in industries like computer programming, where sophisticated math goes into designing algorithms. In the future, I think we'll continue to see other industries finding out how huge the benefits of math can be.
This may surprise those of you who assumed that the British contraction is older than the N. American one, but the opposite is in fact true.
The first use of 'math' recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is in 1849, whereas its earliest recorded entry for 'math' is in 1911, penned by the English War Poet Wilfred Owen
The well-known plural form 'mathematics' is to be compared with terms such as physics and metaphysics. In early use, the subjects were often referred to in the singular, as matamatik, fiskyke, and metaphesyk. In plural, they connoted something entirely different. For instance, physics was the title of Aristotle's collected physical treatises. 'Mathematics' would be used to denote the collection of the various branches of mathematics, such as geometry, algebra, etc. In modern usage, 'mathematic' and 'physic' have fallen by the wayside and the plural forms have taken their place.
Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?
This is a widely-cited and often misquoted (and misunderstood) theorem in economics. "Win-win" in this situation requires that the winners compensate the losers. If you don't pay compensation for the loss (e.g., the salary they would have earned), then you have a winner and a loser, period. You have no way to say that one's gain offsets the other's pain.
The economic theorem says that the monetary gain for the winners is great enough that it is *possible* for the winners to compensate the losers so to leave as well off as before. In this case everyone is at least as well off. But if you don't compensate the losers, you can't say a thing.
You're only partially right. Axioms are statements that (1) can't be proven, and (2) you assume are true, and everything is built upon them. However, there are other, non-axiomatic, statements in any formal system that cannot be proven either true or false. That's what the parent was talking about (hence the mention of the Godel's incompleteness theorem). :)
BTW, if you're a CS major, you've encountered this in the form of the Halting Problem
I think you over-estimate the quality of life at the poverty line and all the problems that go along with it. The sense that you give is that people who live under the line have all the amenities everyone else has, but only to a lower quality.
Let me help you out here. I lived with a family of 6 whose yearly average of taxable income of $14,000 (c.2000). We received welfare ($600/month), food stamps ($250/month), and received subsidized rent via HUD ($-400/month). As you can tell, we were below the poverty line.
Now consider the average education level of those under the line. I think my family was a good example having a Vietnam-vet with a GED as a father and a middle-school-educated mother. They were not capable of finding significant income in an area that would allow "people like us" to live.
They eventually got a car-- an '80s junker on a 16% interest loan. We had 2 color televisions with cable. "Why?," you ask? because there is literally NO OTHER WAY OF ESCAPE in a society that focuses around entertainment! A one-time cost of $200 and a monthly cost of $25 is damn reasonable when you consider that most Slashdotters rarely think more than twice about upgrading their system (or buying a new one) with a pricetag of 200+.
Lastly, there's all the qualitative differences in a family that lives below the poverty line. There's frustration (an extreme understatement here) of being stuck and unable to provide. This anger is, more often than not, expressed physically with women and children on the receiving end. There's depression, lack of confidence, in ability to socialize outside of your born-in group as other groups cost money to associate with, no culture of education... there is no hope.
So, before you rain judgement from upon high based on severly miscalculated eyeball-assumptions, give it a shot.
--Ps. The polio thing made me laugh. If you're poor and living in California, you have a limited number of times you can see a physician, emergency room, dentist, or an optometrist in a year. When I was in high school ('96-'00) we had 6 stickers on our Medical tickets. 1) Glasses, 2) Fillings, 3) busted thumb in PE, 4,5,6) Tonsilitis. After that, and with a 104-fever, I was SOL.