How Do You Use Mathematics?

TheBody

I thought it might be a good idea to start a thread on how we use mathematics in our daily lives, be that work or school.

To get the ball rolling, I work in a university maths dept. I guess it's pretty obvious how I use maths!! I teach maths to undergrads of all levels.

So how do you use maths? Are you an engineer, accountant, teacher etc. Maybe you study maths because you want to !!

Yakuza

I work in IT in the insurance sector and have an actuarial background (i.e packed in the exams years ago and took them up again ). By day, I don't use maths too much in my current role (perhaps some stats and extrapolations in related to timings / performance of IT systems I've written), by night I'm juggling with the Institute of Actuaries modelling and life contingency exams (probabilty, Markov Chains, survival models, premium calculations for various (wacky) insurance products). I also like showing my two eldest kids (11½ and 6) tricks for multiplying / squaring / adding numbers, times etc. I do have a good general interest in maths and my book collection would reflect this

old hippy

Over the years my job has morphed entirely into numbers. It's about dates, deadlines, categories and sheer volumes of numbers. It involves a lot of counting up and counting down. If you'd told me in my schooldays I'd be dealing with so many numbers, I'd have run screaming. Was not the mae west at mathematics.

TheBody

old hippy wrote: »

Over the years my job has morphed entirely into numbers. It's about dates, deadlines, categories and sheer volumes of numbers. It involves a lot of counting up and counting down. If you'd told me in my schooldays I'd be dealing with so many numbers, I'd have run screaming. Was not the mae west at mathematics.

I understand if you want to keep it private but do you want to tell us what area you work in?

Might be nice if we can build up a thread that highlights how maths is used in MANY different sectors.

old hippy

TheBody wrote: »

I understand if you want to keep it private but do you want to tell us what area you work in?

Might be nice if we can build up a thread that highlights how maths is used in MANY different sectors.

I guess you could call it media.

locum-motion

The most maths I do on an 'everyday' basis is my 7 times tables!

2 tablets 4 times daily for 3 weeks
= 2 x 4 x 3 x 7
= 24 x 7
= 168 tablets, and that sort of thing.

I'm a pharmacist.
Of course, I have to do more challenging calculations than that occasionally, but that's the main daily thing.

brophya2007

Yakuza wrote: »

I work in IT in the insurance sector and have an actuarial background (i.e packed in the exams years ago and took them up again ). By day, I don't use maths too much in my current role (perhaps some stats and extrapolations in related to timings / performance of IT systems I've written), by night I'm juggling with the Institute of Actuaries modelling and life contingency exams (probabilty, Markov Chains, survival models, premium calculations for various (wacky) insurance products). I also like showing my two eldest kids (11½ and 6) tricks for multiplying / squaring / adding numbers, times etc. I do have a good general interest in maths and my book collection would reflect this

Can you give us an insight into your book collection please

Iderown

That's what I do. Electronic circuit design and construction as hobby. Mathematics is very useful: properties of sin and cos for rms and peak-to-peak emfs. Linear equations for calculating currents, emfs and power in resistive circuits. Complex numbers to help analyse ac circuits with L, C and R. And much more.
Any more examples wanted?
Also happen to be involved (again as pastime) in the math modelling of processes involved in skin expansion.

Peregrine

School.

Doing Higher Maths, Physics and Applied Maths for the Leaving Cert and hoping to do Physics or Maths at third level

Colonel Sanders

General Insurance Actuary, work in capital modelling

Who gives a sh!t about the mean, extreme values are far more interesting!

I also punt a good bit in my leisure time so (puts on nerd hat) have modelled premiership football odds via binomial GLMs

*keeps nerd hat on*

When I'm not doing either of the above I'm realising that I'm applying logic to everything from driving to work, trying to keep my mouth shut when I realise there's a statistical reason for a lot of what my friends call "crazy" and then biting my tongue again when I realise some pub talk (especially around sports) is readily explainable/bunkem

But despite being a self confessed maths nerd I am actually good fun to have a drink with!!!

Justin1982

I use maths in derivative pricing and programing in work. Its actually pretty interesting how they build all these models for how much some of these wierd financial instruments are worth.

But one of the main uses I got from studying maths and theoretical physics in college is the ability to confront and solve lifes little problems. Most people I see these days panic when confronted with the slightest issue or shy away from problems.

Ompala

In 2nd year Chemical Engineering, use maths to solve differential equations, mainly laplace transforms, to model reaction processes, determine reaction rates and the time taken to complete them, use other parts of integration to calculate energy inputs and heat loss.

Having said that, other parts of maths I've studied were very interesting to me even if I won't use them, particularly vector spaces that I'm doing atm.

Pythia

I am another actuary. I do R&D pricing work for general insurance, so stuff like GLMs. I suppose it's more stats than maths though! Trying to fit distributions to losses and claim frequencies, gauging which models are better, fits, curves etc.

Love my job!

Yakuza

brophya2007 wrote: »

Can you give us an insight into your book collection please

Some of my more recent acquisitions (and some of my older actuarial books too). Most of my old-ish maths books (Martin Gardner) are boxed and in my attic from when I moved out of my folks' house

bnt

Not much Maths in my work - instead I'm having arguments there about others' misuse of Statistics. Most notably over-use of the Mean (average) function, when the distribution of the data is nowhere close to Normal and the Median would give more meaningful results. The data is messy, outliers all over the shop - so what does "average" mean, then?

I use more Maths in fun applications e.g. I'm learning Processing, and programmed a simple shooting game, where calculating bullet trajectories means lots of trigonometry.

764dak

Pythia wrote: »

I am another actuary. I do R&D pricing work for general insurance, so stuff like GLMs. I suppose it's more stats than maths though! Trying to fit distributions to losses and claim frequencies, gauging which models are better, fits, curves etc.

Love my job!

Isn't statistics a branch of mathematics, though?

Pythia

764dak wrote: »

Isn't statistics a branch of mathematics, though?

I suppose it's a mathematical science but is not 'maths' itself. It's a bit like maths-lite I suppose, haha.

BaronVon

I'm a forensic collision investigator in the guards. I collect physical evidence at a scene, map it, and use basic applied maths and trig, to model the pre-collision behaviour, when possible (although usually not possible).

The maths would be fairly basic to the posters in this forum, but doing this has re-awakened my love of maths, and I'm now studying maths part time at 3rd level.

TheBody

infacteh wrote: »

I'm a forensic collision investigator in the guards. I collect physical evidence at a scene, map it, and use basic applied maths and trig, to model the pre-collision behaviour, when possible (although usually not possible).

The maths would be fairly basic to the posters in this forum, but doing this has re-awakened my love of maths, and I'm now studying maths part time at 3rd level.

Is it as exciting as CSI would lead us to believe?

BaronVon

TheBody wrote: »

Is it as exciting as CSI would lead us to believe?

Real life is never filled with the same type of suspense. I blame the lack of mood music constantly playing in the background! :pac:

hypersonic

I am an engineer so I sculpt with numbers, mathematics is my hammer and chisel.

ScaldyMc

Quantitative Analyst. So mainly statistics, building financial risk models all day every day. Mostly logistic regression scorecards

doc_17

Colonel Sanders wrote: »

General Insurance Actuary, work in capital modelling

Who gives a sh!t about the mean, extreme values are far more interesting!

I also punt a good bit in my leisure time so (puts on nerd hat) have modelled premiership football odds via binomial GLMs

*keeps nerd hat on*

When I'm not doing either of the above I'm realising that I'm applying logic to everything from driving to work, trying to keep my mouth shut when I realise there's a statistical reason for a lot of what my friends call "crazy" and then biting my tongue again when I realise some pub talk (especially around sports) is readily explainable/bunkem

But despite being a self confessed maths nerd I am actually good fun to have a drink with!!!

Can I ask how well you're doing at predicting premiership result? Hopefully you're making some money!

Colonel Sanders

doc_17 wrote: »

Can I ask how well you're doing at predicting premiership result? Hopefully you're making some money!

Tbh it's quite a rough model, I simply looked at all results since the premiership went to 20 teams and looked at how many point separated the teams at season end.

Fit a binomial GLM and you can see either

1. The probability of a home win given an assumed points difference
2. Given a price what does it say about the relative abilities if both teams

Thoie

I'm an IT project manager, and maths crop up in odd places in my job. Most of it is pretty basic compared to what a lot of people in this forum are doing, but as a kid in school I never thought I'd want to calculate the angle of a line for an executive presentation...

A lot of the things I use are fairly simple arithmetic, though I find it surprising how often I have to show people how to calculate things. A common example is if we want to sell something for exactly €19.99, inc VAT, then what do we need to set the ex-VAT price at? If the VAT changes from 19% to 21%, but we want to keep the price at €19.99, how much do we need to adjust the ex-VAT price by.

Recently we were graphing a metric (%) against some other things. In Excel, we added a trendline. We then wanted to see what would be the new target numbers in order to get the same sloped trendline, a bit higher up. Excel was able to tell me the slope of the existing trendline, but then had to recalculate the new line with a precise offset.

I also use statistics more than I thought I would. I don't do much calculation of them, but need to understand what other people are basing their numbers on, and how that can affect things. If someone comes to me and says that Fred is causing 50% of all the errors in a 10 man team, the answer is not to run off and say "bad Fred". It turns out that Fred is doing 95% of that kind of work, so a more accurate way to look at it is number of errors per hours of work, or per lines of code or per biscuits eaten. When you look at it that way, Fred is generally the most accurate person and Mary Kate is the one to watch out for.

Permutations come up more often than I'd like, but useful to figure out what's really being asked for.

smacl

I'm a software developer in the geospatial domain, more algorithm design than pure maths, though I use a fair amount of computational geometry (meshing / topology etc..), discrete methods, and a fair bit of least squares for fitting purposes.

rmacm

Network engineer here...mostly pretty simple stuff e.g. calculating subnets, adding up how many physical connections a piece of hardware needs to connect to our infrastructure. Nothing too taxing

Jimmy Iovine

Primary teacher - I've had to relearn how I teach maths. I always used the column method, but the school I'm in (in England) think that the children need to get a better understanding of the numbers involved so they use a load of other methods before getting to the column method. Grid method, number lines, jigsaw numbers and partitioning are all my best friends now.

It's seriously frustrating but really interesting to work in a class (4th) where you have children who have no problem with multiplying 279 by 56 and then other children who need to use their fingers to add 7 and 6. One poor child added 7 and 4 and wrote down 10. Her problem is that she doesn't think before she write down answers.

I was a whizz at maths in primary so it's a real eye-opener working with children who struggle so much.

3qsmavrod5twfe

Engineer in Medical device industry. Stats are used on a near daily basis. Numbers are my bitch!