Mathematics

[mike777]

The good news is more mathematics has been discovered since 1900 than in all of human history before. The bad news is in the 1985-86 academic year just under a million students received bachelor degrees in the U.S, of which 16,100 majored in mathematics or statistics but in 2004 the bachelor degree total grew 42% to 1.4 million but the number majoring in mathematics or statistics shrank 17% to 13,300.

One cannot blame the decrease on the rise in computer science, over the same period cs majors just kept pace with bachelor degrees increasing 41% from 42,300 to 59,500.

[helene_t]

Wow, 13,300 math B.Sc.s in one year. Based on our population of 16 mio people, we should produce some 750 a year here in the Netherlands. The actual number is about 300. It must be said that Dutch universities consider their own "doctoraal"-diploma as an equivalent of the U.S. M.Sc. rather than B.Sc.

[jtfanclub]

The good news is more mathematics has been discovered since 1900 than in all of human history before.

We just now found out that the Arabs a thousand years ago knew things about mathematics that we just discovered in the 70s. It wouldn't shock me at all for us to discover something about math next year only to find out, hey, those Egyptians knew it all along. We just weren't smart enough to figure it out.

 

We do a better job of proving things now than we used to. The four color theorem has been known for millenia, but we just proved it a few years ago, Color me unimpressed.

 

Outside of cryptography, I'm not sure how useful mathematics has become. I don't know if more mathematical revelations are found by physicists these days than mathematiticans, but it sure seems like it.

[BebopKid]

I love math, but I love applied math more. I had more than the minimum hours required for my Math Minor.

 

I chose Computer Science and work in the Electric Industry where I love getting to use math in electrical engineering applications.

 

Physics, or better Astrophysics, or Enigneering would have been other choices for me.

 

I think possibly a lot of those people that might have chosen math are choosing another field in which they get to apply math in real world applications.

[Winstonm]

I can count to 13 and usually know within 1 or 2 how many trumps are outstanding.

[Gerben42]

Wow, 13,300 math B.Sc.s in one year. Based on our population of 16 mio people, we should produce some 750 a year here in the Netherlands. The actual number is about 300. It must be said that Dutch universities consider their own "doctoraal"-diploma as an equivalent of the U.S. M.Sc. rather than B.Sc.

 

This makes a big difference IMHO. You'd have to count the Mathematics M.Sc. in the US to really compare the numbers.

 

Physics, or better Astrophysics, or Enigneering would have been other choices for me.

 

I did Astrophysics, in my opinion it is the most beautiful part of Physics since you get to deal with the "big questions" and need to combine so many fields.

[Gerben42]

Outside of cryptography, I'm not sure how useful mathematics has become. I don't know if more mathematical revelations are found by physicists these days than mathematiticans, but it sure seems like it.

 

What about differential equations, dynamical systems and chaos theory. Game theory? Graph theory? Group theory?

 

The list goes on. It's all connected, and mathematics is all around us.

[mike777]

Mathematicians are like a certain type of Frenchmen: when you talk to them they translate it into their own language, and then it soon turns into something completely different.

 

 

Goethe

[Al_U_Card]

1+1=3 or more......the only planetary law that counts.....baby :)

[helene_t]

Outside of cryptography, I'm not sure how useful mathematics has become. I don't know if more mathematical revelations are found by physicists these days than mathematiticans, but it sure seems like it.

At the instititute where I took my math B.Sc. (Copenhagen), the largest research group focuses on mathematical applications in quantum physics. I don't understand anything about what they are talking about but given the practical relevance of most of what I read about quantum physics in popular journals, my guess is that a substantial part of it is useful. If it seems like most (useful) mathematics is discovered by physicists, it may be because much of what they do is made in collaboration with phycisists and/or published in physics journals. Probably the pure mathematical basis doesn't reach popular journals, while applications to physics do.

 

My own work is about mathematical models applied in medical research. When I talk about my work with laymen, its usually about the application field rather than the mathematical models themselves.

 

When I started doing studying math, a friend of mine asked me what kind of work I'd do afterwards. I said I hoped to become a scientist. She found that odd, since she thought everything in math had allready been discovered. ROFL.

[jtfanclub]

My own work is about mathematical models applied in medical research. When I talk about my work with laymen, its usually about the application field rather than the mathematical models themselves.

I was going to include biologists as well, should have.

 

Do you not find that a large number of people in the field of mathematical models in medical research got their first degree in biology, chemistry, or pre-med? You could be right, and it could just be because I see it from the application aspect, but it seems like very few of the people in the field are simply 'mathematicians'.

 

It seems like the other 'hard science' fields require so much math these days, that people interested in math go into those fields first, and go after their math research from a practical angle. But I could be wrong.

[P_Marlowe]

My own work is about mathematical models applied in medical research. When I talk about my work with laymen, its usually about the application field rather than the mathematical models themselves.

I was going to include biologists as well, should have.

 

Do you not find that a large number of people in the field of mathematical models in medical research got their first degree in biology, chemistry, or pre-med? You could be right, and it could just be because I see it from the application aspect, but it seems like very few of the people in the field are simply 'mathematicians'.

 

It seems like the other 'hard science' fields require so much math these days, that people interested in math go into those fields first, and go after their math research from a practical angle. But I could be wrong.

Not surprsing.

 

The best mathematics developed from problems

which did arise out of practical problems, that was

in the past, and I am pretty certain it will be so in

the future.

If mathematicians are left to their own, some

loose the contact to earth.

 

Pure Mathematics is quite rare, but if it gets tough,

you need real experts, not autodidacts.

But to explain the problems, people in the field

need to learn the terminology.

 

With kind regards

Marlowe

[helene_t]

Do you not find that a large number of people in the field of mathematical models in medical research got their first degree in biology, chemistry, or pre-med?  You could be right, and it could just be because I see it from the application aspect, but it seems like very few of the people in the field are simply 'mathematicians'.

 

It seems like the other 'hard science' fields require so much math these days, that people interested in math go into those fields first, and go after their math research from a practical angle.  But I could be wrong.

Let me see. My first supervisor was a biochemist, the second a mathematician. Most fellow juniors at my old department were mathematicians but there were two psychologists, a lab technician with a second degree in biostatistics and a biologist as well. There was some related research going on in the bioinformatices department where most people had a background in either chemistry or computer science.

 

Where I work now, all those doing modeling are mathematicians but one took his first master's in history and his second in math.

 

It's difficult for most (I think) to learn math at an old age, it's a way of thinking that you have to get used to while you have a young and "plastic" brain. My first supervisor was a rare example of someone who always had math as a hobby and was able to invent new math when het was in his fifties although he never took a college class in math. Most non-mathematicians involved in research project related to development of mathematical models in biology fall into two cathegories:

- Biologists who work with the evaluation of existing models in the context of specific biological problems.

- Computer scientists who implement existing mathematical models (sometimes originally developed for entirely different application fields) or experimenting with more or less ad-hoc computations methods for shortcutting around the math, often a combination of the two.

 

The portation of existing mathematical models between entirely different fields is quite difficult. It requires enough knowledge of the "donor" field to be aware of the existance and potential of the model, enough knowledge of the "reciepient" field to see the need for the model in a different context, and enough knowledge of math (or philophy, if you prefer) to be able to "lift" the model to a high enough level of abstraction to see the relatedness between the original problem and the new one.

[whereagles]

I'm a physicist and I can tell you theoretical physics stands at a crossroads today. There are a couple major open questions and no one seems to be able to disentangle them. It's been like that for the last 30 years or so. Some of the million dollar questions are:

 

1. explain confinement

2. a theory of quantum gravity

3. are there extra dimensions?

4. is there supersymmetry?

 

The large hadron collider at CERN will probably shed some light to 3 and 4, but 1 and 2 seem quite intractable....

[Al_U_Card]

Isn't "Brane" theory hot on the trail?

[whereagles]

Brane world theories might explain 3 and 4, but aren't well-devolped enough to explain 1 and 2.