Alumnis Careers

• I got interested in Finance after I attended a seminar presentation in the Mathematics department while I was finishing my Honors. The presentation was about the Black-Scholes options pricing formula, a beautiful mathematical application to a long-standing open question in Finance.

The impact of this formula on the financial markets was gigantic, increasing the numbers of options traded and creating an entire new field of study within Finance. Seeing how mathematics could be applied to a practical problem in finance got me interested in this subject, and I completed a Masters thesis on the modelling of interest rate targeting.

Once my Masters degree was completed I applied for Phd scholarships in Finance at Business Schools in the USA. Once I complete the PhD I’ll be on the job market. My advice to students wanting to move in a similar direction is to build a solid mathematical background as it will give one an edge and open doors in many different disciplines. Have fun! -

Artemiza Woodgate - PhD candidate in Finance, BSc(Hons) in Mathematics from the UoA.

• When I first started at The University of Auckland, I had no real idea as to what I wanted to do for a job, let alone a career. I decided to leave my options open and I chose to do a Bachelor of Science.

My undergraduate course gave me an opportunity to study a lot of the things that interested me such as philosophy, physics, computer science, chemistry and mathematics. At the end of my degree, I had a major in mathematics and had been thinking about leaving to get a job as a software developer.

Before I made up my mind I went and talked to Professor Butcher about what my options would be if I chosed to continue on to do a Masters in mathematics. He convinced me that there were some interesting papers and research areas to get involved in if I chose to. That (and the student lifestyle!) convinced me to stay on for another two years. During my Masters

I had a great degree of freedom to study some very interesting topics such as fractal geometry, numerical methods in Hamiltonian systems and gravitational micro-lensing. Within these areas there was a great deal of computational and technical work to get through, much of which I had never come across before.

After two years of work I was very familiar with feeling as though I didn’t know enough to solve the problem, but that I should give it a try anyway. This would turn out to be one of the most important aspects of my university training. - Mike Harré - Commerce Commission. MSc in Mathematics from UoA

• When I first began thinking about going to university, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I had already decided to enroll at The University of Auckland because of its reputation for having good programs in a number of disciplines. There were so many areas I was interested in and I wasn’t quite sure which one to choose. In the end, I enrolled in a BSc in mathematics and physics. I felt that together these areas would provide me with a good foundation for a wide range of possible later careers.

It wasn’t until towards the end of this degree, having picked up a BA in philosophy along the way, that I really began to feel firm about where I wanted to go with my studies. I had become quite taken with the idea of studying aeronautics/astronautics, but it took me this long to realize that it was actually something that I could do.

An Honours degree in applied maths at Auckland seemed the next logical step. Having completed this degree, I decided to accept an offer from the California Institute of Technology. I gained a Masters degree in 2002 and a PHD in 2006. My specialty is hypersonic (i.e. very fast) gas dynamics - the topic of my research is the entry of meteoroids into the earth’s atmosphere. This is a very interesting and relevant problem, not only because of the potential hazard to human life posed by such objects, but also because it is a very similar problem in many ways to the entry of a man-made object into an extraterrestrial planetary atmosphere. This is important to me, as atmospheric entry and aero-capture (using a planet’s atmosphere to slow a spacecraft down) is an area that I would very much like to pursue in my future career. I believe that my undergraduate education has stood me in very good stead for my current work. For some reason it seems that mathematics provides a fairly good description of the world around us even something as seemingly exotic as a spacecraft entering an alien atmosphere!” - Dr. Stuart Laurence - BSc in Mathematics, BSc(Hons) in Applied Mathematics, UoA, PhD in Aeronautics, Caltec