A few months ago, I received an e-mail with the subject line: "BusinessWeek's Tech Alert: Math Will Rock Your World." I didn't read it immediately, but instead kept it in the back of my mind as a kind of "to do" entry for a later time. A couple of weeks ago, I finally took the time to read the article, which was the cover story of the January 23rd, 2006 issue of Business Week. Written by Stephen Baker (with Bremen Leak in New York), the blurb for the article reads as follows: "The world is moving into a new age of numbers. Partnerships between mathematicians and computer scientists are bulling into whole new domains of business and imposing the efficiencies of math. They’re helping to map out advertising campaigns, they’re changing the nature of research in newsrooms and in biology labs, and they’re enabling marketers to forge new one-on-one relationships with customers. As this occurs, more of the economy falls into the realm of numbers."
Some things that caught my attention in the article were statements like, "…calculus, the gateway for math-based disciplines" and " The rise of mathematics is heating up the job market for luminary quants, especially at the Internet powerhouses where new math grads land with six-figure salaries and rich stock deals." A quant, I believe, is short for quantitative analyst.
The article got me thinking about my own days with calculus. I really enjoyed the subject. But the real benefit to me was the effect of this knowledge on all my other engineering courses. In math, it helped me with a course called Engineering Math and another called Partial Differential Equations. As for Physics, Chemistry, Electrical Fields and other courses, I understood them better mathematically than I did physically or chemically or electrically due to my knowledge of calculus. But I never thought to pursue mathematics further, once I began my engineering career.
When I landed my first engineering job, I was kind of surprised that calculus was nowhere to be found. For the most part, addition and subtraction, things I learned in first grade, were the order of the day, since Kirchoff's laws are the sums or differences of voltages and currents in a circuit. I also got into logic gates, and the math for these is also fairly simple, maybe something I learned in the seventh grade. Where was calculus in the electronic engineering world, I wondered? Unfortunately, I didn't stick around that world long enough to find out, since I moved into publishing fairly early in my engineering career. And believe me, just as there's no crying in baseball, there's no calculus in publishing other than typesetting calculus symbols in some technical journals. If anyone reading this uses calculus in his engineering work on a fairly regular basis, I'd like to hear about it.
Mathematical models were also covered in the Business Week story. I certainly never created a mathematical model in my engineering job and do not have a reason to do so in my publishing job. However, the article points out that many different types of companies rely on mathematical models to make predictions for their businesses. There seems to be some kind of mathematical divide in the business world between the have (mathematical models) and have nots (have no models). I'm fond of telling people that most people do not use the computing power of computers. By this I mean, that most people use computers as a substitute for something else, like a typewriter. They may take advantage of the computer's ability to run a word processor, for example, but they don't try to actually program the computer.
The article also covers algorithms, which are part and parcel of mathematical models. The biggest use of algorithms in the electronics industry is for DSPs. That is, if you want a DSP to do something, you create a mathematical algorithm first and then program that algorithm to run on the DSP. This holds true for microprocessors, too, and you can see the results in many kinds of test equipment, such as digital storage oscillosopes (DSOs) that do a wide range of mathematical analysis on waveforms. I don't think I ever created an algorithm during my college or work years, but think it would have been great fun to do so.
Not only is this article a great read, but it can also serve to motivate young people who are considering a career in mathematics, computer science or engineering, especially when you realize that companies are competing for mathematical talent and are prepared to spend big bucks to get it.
So there it is. If you're wondering how math is rocking our world, mosey over to the Business Week site and read through the article or download the podcast of it. (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968001.htm?campaign_id=search)
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