• Question: Do your jobs involve computer science as well as maths?

    Asked by Immy on 1 Apr 2025.
    • Photo: Ruth Augarde

      Ruth Augarde answered on 1 Apr 2025:

      Yes, I work in engineering and use bits of maths, science, and computer science to solve problems. Lots of mathematicians and scientists use computer science, like writing some code to do tricky calculations or to automate things that would take a long time to do by hand!

    • Photo: John Easton

      John Easton answered on 1 Apr 2025:

      There’s some maths – but nothing really beyond GCSE level. A bit of computer science (but mostly again first principals stuff) but a lot of experience and history of having seen lots of things that I can learn from. Sometimes that is all about people and how to deal with them, sometimes it’s more technology related. Everything you learn over the years has a role to play somewhere.

    • Photo: Caroline Roche

      Caroline Roche answered on 12 May 2025:

      Yes, my job combines engineering, math’s, physics and computer science all rolled into one – with control systems you get to try out a little bit of everything.

Comments

  • Photo: Charlotte

    Charlotte commented on :

    My job uses a lot of both but within the field of biology. I create computer models (based on maths equations) to predict how tumours will respond to cancer treatments. I am also starting a new project at the moment where I am looking at using AI and machine learning to predict differences between how patients respond to cancer treatments and try to find out what causes these differences.

  • Photo: Edward

    Edward commented on :

    Yes. If you are using maths in industry, you are likely to be using special software, e.g. ANSYS, modelling tool for engineers. You may have mathematical ideas that you think can solve a problem and you want to try them out. It is very unlikely you could compute it by hand and you certainly couldn’t do so quickly, so having a basic level of programming knowledge is really helpful, such as Python.

    I suffered when I completed by undergrad degree in maths because they did not emphasise how useful programming was. I got many interviews but was always rejected because whilst in principle I could do a lot of things, in practise, I couldn’t implement it.

    I use a lot of Matlab in my day to day work and it helps me quickly prototype and model problems. I definitely recommend learning a little python and certainly to the level where you can implement some of the maths you do in school.