• Question: What type of jobs can you do as a mathematician

    Asked by task522fees on 3 Feb 2025. This question was also asked by puma522fees, suns522fees, seem522wasp, what522wasp, east522case.
    • Photo: Kathryn Howells

      Kathryn Howells answered on 3 Feb 2025:

      There are a lot of jobs you can do as a mathematician. I work as a Statistician in the Pharmaceutical industry which involves working with other scientists to develop and test new treatments to help patients.

      I’ve also worked within a hospital, advising doctors on the statistical aspects of the the medical research they were doing and analysing the data they gathered. I’ve also worked in a large bank within their marketing department, calculating the probability of a customer opening a banking product based on marketing.

      I also have friend that’s studied maths and have become accountants, working within insurance companies and teachers.

      Most large companies now collect data – from football and rugby premiership sports clubs to supermarkets and online companies and so they need people that are good at maths to summarise the data, creating graphs, calculating means etc to inform business decisions.

    • Photo: Ruth McLauchlan

      Ruth McLauchlan answered on 5 Feb 2025:

      All kinds of job. Studying maths gives you tools that will help you throughout life. Mathematicians are employed in all kinds of areas, not just accountancy and banking. All the computer software and now Artificial Intelligence algorithms need mathematicians to develop the models. Data analysis is a big interest for all kinds of companies and healthcare – think about all the data that the NHS must have and what we could learn from it if we had people who had the time and skills to analyse it.

Comments

  • Photo: lisachatterjee

    lisachatterjee commented on :

    All sorts. Maths is really helpful, even if just to help critical thinking. We use it everyday in hydrology and river engineering. You don’t have to be amazing at maths. Just have to have a curiosity to work things out.

  • Photo: Edward

    Edward commented on :

    I am glad you asked this question as I always struggled with this when I was at school. It seemed like the 3 choices were teaching, accountancy/finance and IT jobs. I tried accountancy as a work experience placement for two weeks when I was 15 and it was not for me. I really liked maths but it was hard to see what to do with it as I didn’t see any professional mathematicians on tv.
    I did maths at university more because I enjoyed it without any real career in mind.
    Fortunately, you can check out https://www.mathscareers.org.uk/
    This has real mathematicians talking about what they do and it is so varied. It really opens your eyes to what you can do with maths.
    Additionally, maths is all about using a logical approach to solving problems. You can be presented with what looks like a really hard problem (maths or otherwise) and you don’t know how to start it. Maths degrees give you a lot of training so even if you don’t go into a career where you use maths everyday, you will likely use these problem solving skills.