Abstract: This post is dedicated to students who enjoy maths but think that it is something that they won’t need once they leave the classroom. It’s also designed to communicate the diverse range of roles related to maths that people can work in. I have so many things I want to achieve, and this post tried to share that excitement with students just beginning their journey.
As part of the AMSI summer research project everyone had to contribute not only their research paper but a short post. My entry is inspired by a conversation I had with RMIT’s Professor Asha Roa, as we sat enjoying lunch on the very last day of the conference. We were talking about maths communication, and I shared that, growing up, though there are quite a few people who enjoy mathematics, they were unaware of the opportunities they had post school. Her understanding, and our resulting conversation made me think it was worth writing something to this point.
This post is dedicated to students who enjoy maths but think that it is something that they won’t need once they leave the classroom. It’s also designed to communicate the diverse range of roles related to maths that people can work in.
Suppose you are in interested in sports. You grew up playing football and friends around you had repetitive strain injuries that got worse or didn’t heal, and you wanted to go into sports science. There are roles for specialists who design supportive wearable technologies aimed at reducing recovery time for athletes. There’s a lot of maths and physics that goes into designing the best way that a fabric or a supporting structure moves around your joints and provides support without uncomfortable pressure. This involves maths.
Perhaps you enjoy helping other others, and you see psychology as an incredibly rewarding career. The psychological sciences require professionals to have a good understanding of how different drugs and therapies interact with each other. Most drugs have key active ingredients and a different dose rate for different conditions. Part of your role as a therapist or a psychologist is going to be understanding those dosages and being able to recommend something that takes this into account whilst minimising negative side effects. This involves maths.
Perhaps you’re someone like myself, wildly passionate about the ocean and you want to work on oceans, or marine science. Maybe you want to turn the tide against the bleaching of coral reefs, or create better sea starts to support coral nurseries. Or maybe you’d like to model the spread of killer sea stars who spread across the ocean and have affected marine ecosystems. Modelling these movements, understanding how warmer currents travel the globe, or modelling stronger structures for coral-stars, involves mathematics.
Regardless, you, just like every other person on the planet, are going to be living in some sort of house, working some sort of job and paying some sort of bills. Our goals as humans should always be to try and maximise our happiness and the time that we spend doing the things we love, but society says that we must also do things like taxes. Mathematics will help you optimise your life. Mathematics will help you solve problems and allow you to come up with better solutions to improve your overall life. Put simply, there is no area in anyone’s life that cannot be improved by being a better problem solver. So if you are reading this, and maybe you enjoy maths but you are not sure where it leads, just know that there are almost as many possibilities as there are stars.
Trillion White
Deakin University
