and here's another US site with information about Careers in Mathematics, Women in Mathematics, lots of interesting stuff...(click the red arrow)
Why Mathematics?
“I'm going to be a microbiologist (geneticist, economist, stock-market financial analyst, computer graphics designer, electronic commercial transaction engineer, multimedia technologist, environmental resource manager, ...). There's a lot of units offered in my field of interest and not much room in my degree course for any unrelated stuff. OK, so a physicist or an engineer might need some more advanced maths, but I've done a lot of mathematics at secondary school, including Calculus — that's all that's needed for my chosen area, right?”
Wrong!
Just look at some typical lecture notes from various ANU courses shown below ...
The fact is that advanced mathematics is being used more and more in previously non-mathematical areas — and mathematically-trained people are in heavy demand in these disciplines because many of those now in the field do not have the necessary maths background to understand the latest developments!
For example, here is a short list of some areas outside of the “physical” sciences, and some of the mathematical ideas you may need in order to study them — each of the topics mentioned is offered by the Mathematics Department:
Information transfer (banking, the Internet, video and sound compression) : coding theory, discrete mathematics, fractals
Information security : cryptography, number theory
Biology (Genetics, enzymes,...) : partial differential equations, linear algebra, bioinformatics, biological modelling
Geography, Ecology, Weather and Climate analysis : differential equations, linear algebra, mathematical modelling, chaos, environmental modelling
Economics : measure theory, differential equations, optimisation
and almost everything you can think of with any mathematical content: (including Forestry, Computer graphics, Sociology, and even History and Archaeology!) : data analysis, linear algebra, linear programming, numerical analysis, discrete mathematics.
And if you're thinking of research in any of these disciplines or the more traditionally mathematical areas of Physics or Chemistry, you may need even more mathematics, and could do well to do as much Honours level mathematics as you can — it is a lot easier to learn the maths now, rather than later when it becomes much harder to come back to. Many of our Honours students have gone on to brilliant careers in other disciplines, most recently in biology, economics and finance!
Mathematics is particularly suitable as the Science component of a combined degree with Arts, Economics or Law. Surveys have shown that employers perceive that mathematics graduates have problem solving skills — the ability to analyse complex situations, to abstract, conceptualise and quantify the essential elements of a problem, and to understand the limitations as well the advantages of a range of possible solution techniques — which are actually more highly valued than specialised knowledge in particular content areas.
here are some actual pages from notes used in recent ANU courses, all heavily using advanced Mathematics ... the details are unimportant (and unreadable because they have been photo-reduced) but the message is clear!
