“For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics” (NYT 8/6/09)
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding.” -Hal Varian, chief economist at Google
Math stole the front page of the New York Times today. In short, it claimed that a good number of the careers that will pop up in the next decade are going to be based on a math-heavy education, namely the field of statistics. With the growing number of technologies born to process huge quantities of information, we need more human intelligence to do something with all of it, and to make those technologies more efficient.
One example:
A while back, MIT experimented by giving 100 students Blackberries that tracked their movements and actions on campus. One small step for Big Brother, one large step for statisticians. It’s one thing to have a massive amount of data on record about your student body; the hard part is focusing on a specific trend, and extrapolating from it. Humans come into play by deciding how to organize the information into something useful, or at least interesting.
The headline for the general public, or least for school-age students, should be shouted loud and clear: Math is everywhere, not just in your textbooks. You don’t have to be a typical “nerd” to find something that catches your attention in the field of mathematical applications. Most people take advantage of forms of advanced mathematics every day, and anyone with the right kind of analytical mind could contribute to the field in ways yet unimagined.
For once, math education is being glorified based on something other than only salary! (Though, going by the jobs mentioned in the article, that part doesn’t sound too shabby either.) Soon, the secret will be revealed that math can, in fact, be cool to study. And that it involves far more than learning techniques and regurgitating them on worksheets. You could land a gig delving into technologies we take for granted, and making them even better and more user-friendly. Who wouldn’t want to take part in that? I don’t know how many pre-college students are going to read this article, but I would encourage them to do so, before they make up their minds to dismiss math completely.
“You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?” (NYT 11/30/08)
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