What exactly do mathematicians even do?
They make $300k starting duh
>>7959295
They jerk eachother off making fun of engineers and talking about how masterrace they are eventhough 99% of them wont ever contribute anything to the advancement of mathmatics and they will slowly rot away working at some coffee place
>>7959295
Smash mad pussy and pop bottles every wkd. Shits so cash.
>>7959295
Smoke weed and work on dank coloring problems
>sorry for the mess
it's excuse the blood you dead wannabe
>>7959295
I knew one guy who was a mathematician who worked at a university and he worked like 40 hour weeks. His boss would give him or his team a problem to work out and it'd take them around 50-60 hours for them to solve it and as soon as they proved or solved it, they gave them another one.
He basically became an alcoholic and quit after a couple years and found work as a programmer.
>>7959295
Maths
Math PhD student here.
Some of us actually work on very interesting and useful problems.
A very large number of us just work on weird specific problems in insanely niche fields with no known (current or near-future) applications. There is a reason that you cannot really do "real" math research until you are deep into a PhD - it takes fucking forever to get to the frontier.
Applied math is a different story.
>>7959578
>Some of us actually work on very interesting and useful problems
Like what?
Not meaning that in a challenging way, I'm actually curious
>>7959580
NSA cryptologists (or cryptographers, same thing) are mathematicians.
Lots of mathematicians do financial prediction / stock market modeling because people who study Finance / Econ don't know enough math to actually do it.
Occasionally a mathematician is brought into the sciences to help with modeling / solving a problem. (More often than that they bring in a statistician to analyze the data, but.... in my experience they don't actually understand distributions on a deep level)
Applied mathematicians can do things ranging from heat / physics / engineering / fluid super-useful stuff to .... well, I'll just explain with greentext
>meet applied mathematician
>he wants to find the optimal spread of bubbles inside a solid material to reduce potential energy
>he spends his life -formally- proving this to be... a hexagonal grid! and only in 2D, 3D is too hard!
formal proofs are insane
I'll explain some of the work I am interested in.
I am interested in stochastic PDEs. PDEs with a stochastic driving force. One particular example is the KPZ equation. The KPZ equation models random growth. For example the boundary of melonoma (http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/sethna/pubPDF/CellClusters.pdf) or crystals, etc.
SPDEs are very poorly defined. The random term is formally the "derivative" of a random process called Brownian motion. Well, with probability 1 Brownian motion is NOT differentiable. So this derivative really is what's called a "distributional derivative". If you have seen things like delta functions, it's that.
Well KPZ has a nonlinearity which make even distributions poorly defined. So a mathematician, Martin Hairer used a theory called rough paths and extended it to something called regularity structures to deal with KPZ and related SPDEs.
Before Hairer's work, people took the solution to the stochastic linear heat equation, did what's called the Cole Hopf transformation, and called that the solution to KPZ. However this transformation is not well defined either, and is technically introducing some type of infinity. This makes approximating, etc. useless (what actually fucking matters to a scientist studying random growth).
Some mathematicians tried to mollify the white noise, and take a limit. However this limit doesn't exist and/or depends on how you take the limit.
Martin Hairer created a new topology called the rough path topology. He mollifies the white noise and takes a limit, in this limit we actually get a convergent process that is irrespective of the mollifier.
Martin Hairer effectively introduced not only a rigorous notion of a solution, but a theory of approximations (which is what matters to an applied scientist). He won the Field's medal in 2014 for this.
I am just starting graduate school but I am interested in these topics, and in particular applying them to physics.
>>7959593
lol
>>7959615
are you doing applied
>>7959681
I'm doing pure. I am more interested in the mathematics than any particular application. I am interested in rough paths/SPDEs but most good problems especially from areas like this come from some applied area.
>>7959476
this is probably the most accurate answer here
>>7959497
That literally sounds like House.
>>7959295
500kn starting
any job we want
>>7962124
I would love to watch that show. House but as a mathematician.
>>7959306
pretend to make $300k starting and act like golden boys
>>7962147
contact the numb3rs crew immediately
>>7959306
i've never even met anyone that makes 300 k annually.
>>7959338
>They jerk eachother off making fun of engineers and talking about how masterrace they are
That's 19 year old math students, not mathematicians.
>>7959295
>What exactly do mathematicians even do?
they do what you are unable to do, fgt
they can try to memorize pi and deem themselves intelligent because of it
the rest is done by supercomputers and the average joe with a ti84
>>7962753
I have but only one and he's not a mathematician. He's also not a conceited prick like posters on /sci.
>>7959295
They apply mathematical knowledge in development of software or economical fields... what else?
The rest that think that they can do something else become neet.
