Actuaries make a good living using mathematics for risk analysis.
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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Actuary? This is a job title I haven't learned anything about
Basically the people who do the math on risk management for things like insurance and finance.
It’s typically a very regulated job with tests required for different levels. But the pay is good and it’s one of the highest job satisfaction careers out there.
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I don't know a lot about other fields but stat people are hired a lot by research institutions. A good statistician can reduce the number of experiments you need to do, being able to test a drug/treatment with 7 people instead of 100 means a lot. They save a lot of money.
Also being able to make inference from past data, incomplete data, use correct math (there is always different ways to solve things) so they don't make mistakes.
And a lot of people with stat degree join either academia, or other fields that have actual problems and use their background to solve issues.
Depends on which kind of mathematician you ask for, can he utilize said math in engineering, for example, or does he only know pure math?
The analytical skills needed for an advanced math degree are transferable to wide variety of jobs. The tech companies I worked for actively sought out people with those skills, mostly for jobs that didn't require high level math.
A solid foundation in optimization makes your skills useful pretty much anywhere.
Surprised no one has mentioned jobs like the NSA. They're thought to be the largest single employer of mathematicians.
A friend of mine works for a baseball team as a statistician making incredible amounts of money.
My maths teacher back in the late 90s had his little side job doing Cricket stats. He always described it that way. Imagine my surprise when he came clean one day and mentioned he made more money from 8 hours a week doing Cricket stats than he did from 40+ hours a week teaching. He "jokingly" asked if I had made my first million a year after I graduated, mentioned it to my mum and she told me he had turned a $100k inheritance into his first million 2 years later thanks to buying some property in the path of a resort 6 months before planning application was submitted at age 18.
Make Numberphile YouTube vids
There are a lot of different fields of math, and some of them are more useful than others.
Applied math is generally difficult but useful for ask kinds of things from finance to weather prediction.
Pure math is often more academic/paid for by universities.
And most universities realistically pay for math professors by having science and engineering classes take math courses, and by grants for research.
And what about mathematologists like me?
Edit: What do you have against Mathematology?
I really should have said monetizable instead of useful.
You could get hired as a consultant for a state-of-the-art zoo.
Would they spare any expense?
Teaching, winning grants and awards, paid analyst
Spooks (governmental, NGO or the companies who have convenient offices nearby) are always interested in hiring mathematicians.
Something about these answers isn't quite adding up. Are the commenters just trying to divide us?
Some comments seem like the product of some kind of operator. It's as though they have a quotient they're trying to fill for number of posts.
As the number of comments multiplies, I have to wonder if they think they are making a difference.
From my, admittedly limited, interaction with mathematicians in my life and a bit of extrapolation:
- Academia: teach advanced mathematics and do research in mathematics for a university. There's still lots of unsolved problems in math and also plenty of overlap with computer science, which also has lots of research possibilities
- Public sector: governments of all levels need at least statisticians, if not more specific mathematics skills depending on what they're trying to do (e.g. research, engineering, economics, etc.)
- Private sector: lots of engineering companies employ a few mathematicians or at least physicists who are really good at math to make sure their next bridge/plane/ocean-boiler will actually work
There's a lot of overlap between all three but I roughly split them up based on where I'd expect the majority of jobs like that would be (e.g. I'm sure NASA employs a good deal of mathematicians, but so does Lockheed Martin and friends). Also a lot of people get a degree in mathematics and then specialize further with a masters and/or doctorate in computer science or physics, since both of those can be quite math-heavy and are better-funded fields.
does DSP count as maths, because there's plenty of that in radar design. or any other sensor with some double-use potential for that matter
I wouldn't count it as just math. Probably more science or engineering. I did some DSP stuff during my computer engineering degree. But then again, science is applied math and engineering is applied science.
CS and advanced statistics is what lots of applied math is anyway
Physicists get jobs everywhere. They require lots of math, but other info too.
Not really an answer as I don't know any specific math majors other than teaching?
By figuring it out.
I always thought of maths as a language, and physics as using that language to describe everything in the world. I often describe my physics degree as a degree in problem solving, so a maths degree would be similar but more abstract problem solving. So for jobs just about anything that is technical or requires abstract thought.
I have a friend working on a Master's in math. Get back to me in a year or two, and I'll let you know what he's doing.