Eyal Loz
From MathsDept
Most people find mathematics, and the mathematicians who study it, intimidating at the least.
At a party or a social event, when facing a mathematician, most people will usually react in one of three ways:
- 1. Find someone else to talk with.
- 2. Confess that they "have always been bad at mathematics in high-school".
- 3. With a genuine concern, ask about "career prospects as a high-school teacher".
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This is less common, however, if the mathematician in question is still working in academia and is surrounded with other mathematicians at social events, which, unfortunately, I am not. So why would anyone (in their right mind) attempt a PhD program in mathematics, and then, when completing it, attempt to rejoin society and work as a mathematician in industry? What can a mathematician do outside academia and high school anyway? Mathematics is the study of thinking, more so than most other pure sciences. This is the simple consequence of working on hard problems that have very little applications in the real world, if any. Mathematics graduates have stretched their powers of thinking to the limit, and back. A very painful experience indeed. Surprisingly, this apparently wasteful exercise has many applications in the real world; thinking power is worth its weight in gold. Many mathematicians who leave academia (and move to the dark side) end up taking roles in the financial industry as Quants (usually as quant-developers, quant-analysts, analyst-developers, and so on), which require exactly this type of problem solving super thinking nerdy skills. Coming up with original solutions to hard industrial problems is also a major source of employment. |
My personal experience ranges from solving an optimization problem for a tourism related corporation, to figuring out how to communicate with the Australian Stock Exchange price feed servers. As a mathematician - anything goes. Well, almost anything. Even in a time of global recession, mathematicians rarely go hungry. The choice to leave academia was not an easy one. Having very good parents - Professors Marston Conder and Jozef Siran (you decide who is the mother and who is the father) have made my academic experience a very pleasant one. I had the opportunity to lecture and coordinate stage three and graduate level mathematics papers, travel the world, talk in conferences, meet interesting people, join research groups and publish papers. Nevertheless, even after officially leaving, I keep some research projects live and going. In the words of Tana Umaga: "I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father." All the best, Dr. Eyal Loz. |
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