Job Prospects for Math Ph.D

mathboy98
Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:15:07 +0000

There is potential for some degree of compromise in likely a very few research-heavy careers outside of academia. But those careers are probably tough to find.

PDEs are very important in various settings, including the financial world. That’s a more applicable form of pure math, and no, pure math isn’t all useless. Core pure math fundamentals are essential to application. But that isn’t to say the most advanced, crazy research a lot of professors do has immediate application. It’ll be important to someone at some point in the future, but there’s plenty of application to be done without researching a whole new branch of math, and so most jobs will go along with that.

You could go into the financial market for sure. If you like computer science and algorithms, that’s another haven for mathematics lovers. But remember, a PhD is a very narrow thing, and it is unlikely that exactly what you study in the PhD will end up being what your ultimate career is about. Those with only a bachelor’s degree or such can stomach the idea that their career may have less to do with their degree than they’d like a bit better, perhaps because they studied around 5 years less than the PhDs!

Anyway, things like relatively advanced analysis, PDEs/ODEs, number theory do have applications. Whether it is feasible to find a career that uses the level and character of pure math you’d like outside of academia is another story. My unfortunate hypothesis, as one who has the same question as you, is that the answer to your question is mostly negative.

However, I am looking to be enlightened on this subject myself, and will not make any hasty judgements or assert that I know a ton on the answer to this question, though I’ve tried to answer it for a long time.