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04.10

Is there anything you can't do with Math?

By Wole Akpose

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend in which we both reminisced a bit about our decisions, years ago, to become engineers — she, a mechanical engineer from UMBC, and I an electrical engineer from Uniben. She now practices as a material engineer with NASA, and I as a technology manager with Morgan State University and the owner of a technology consulting business, HNT Solutions. Our conversation had started out as a discussion of engineering drawing and my new penchant for collecting engineering drawing tools. But eventually, the conversation turned to our love for mathematics and how it led both of us to careers in engineering.

My friend said she didn’t realize she could do anything other than engineering with her love for mathematics. Perhaps, she mused, she would have set out as a mathematician instead, but she didn’t know what mathematicians do or what other applications mathematics have. As for me, I knew as early as five years old that I wanted to become an engineer. I was fascinated with airplanes in the sky, and wondered what it would take to build something like that someday. I told my dad I was going to build airplanes when I grow up. It didn’t quite work out that way, but nonetheless, in time, I became an electrical engineer. While my friend’s passion for mathematics may have led her to engineering, I am not sure which inclination led me down that path — my desire to build complex systems or my early love for tackling tough problems. I was very good at mathematics, as most of my school grades will show and my GRE quantitative score was in the 99 percentile.

But really, what else can you do with mathematics?

Everything, actually. Mathematics is a very broad area of knowledge and is the foundation not just for engineering (and the long list of engineering fields is growing), but is essential to other scientific fields, including physics and chemistry. But it doesn’t stop there.

Mathematics also happens to be the foundation for accounting, finance and the ever mysterious field of actuarial science (essential to the insurance industry). Astronomy requires ability to understand and use complex mathematics and, increasingly, non-life sciences such as psychology are depending more on statistics (a branch of mathematics) for meaning.

Mathematics include algebra, calculus, set theory, logic, probability, statistics, number theory, geometry, complex numbers and many more interesting subjects and areas of studies. Mathematicians often pick interesting areas in which to specialize, but their skills or their innovations, discoveries and new solutions often benefit entire areas of study. More than twenty years ago, a pair of scientists discovered that a particularly characteristics of numbers could hold the key to an age old problem in cryptography — how to exchange secret keys in real time. Their work, now referred to as public-key-cryptography is central to the world of e-commerce and electronic communication as we know it today. Without an efficient key exchange mechanism, online banking and most of modern e-commerce wouldn’t be feasible, at least not in the secure and cost-effective manner with which we do them now.

Risk is the most traded commodity in the financial market today, accounting for more than 60 trillion dollars in overall value and many times that amount in annual trade. But the underlying premise of risk econometrics is complex probability and statistics. Today, the stars of Wall Street and other financial markets are often mathematicians or people adept at mathematics and no longer mere bean counters (even though bean counting also requires mathematical dexterity).

Of course, engineering requires mathematics, as does any design and manufacturing career, such as architecture. Electrical and computer engineering require mathematical competence, albeit more so in the advanced application areas and in graduate programs than in the general purpose engineering these days, thanks to advanced simulation and computer aided design and engineering software packages (themselves the product of advanced engineering applications) such as mathlab, mathematica, R, and so many more.

As a teenager, I was first introduced to the subject of actuarial science. My high school principal described actuaries as “demi-gods” of mathematical prowess, whose capabilities are stratospheric in nature. I wondered what actuaries actually did until, during my doctoral research, I stumbled on the relationship between actuaries and risk management. I took a keen interest in the theory of copula and its applications for multivariate analysis, and adopted it in developing a unified metric for information systems security. For eighteen months, I wined and dined with the demi-gods described by my high school principal as I delved into the fields of financial econometrics and risk analysis, looking at JP Morgan Chase’s RiskMetrics to Moody’s risk methodologies and in time to insurance actuaries as well as actuaries of mortality. It was an exhilarating journey that demonstrated to me the value of mathematics, beyond its applications to telecommunications, radio, computer systems, structures, aeronautics, astronautics, shipbuilding, instrumentation, power systems, transmission lines, electronics and automation. I saw mathematics as the foundation of modern financial systems and the basis of much of our modern political science, vis-a-vis their relationship to modern economics and the statistics of polling. But the role of mathematics and mathematicians didn’t just stop there.

I have since enhanced my career by delving into the field of performance management and consulting, becoming an expert in Lean methodology and Six Sigma methodologies. Interestingly, much of what is done by performance improvement professionals is based on sound mathematical foundations steeped in statistical analysis. While Lean is predicated on the need to identify wastes in processes and leaning them out using various tools (including many statistical tools), Six Sigma is founded on the theory that variation in processes and systems is often a key culprit in outcome defects. Six Sigma relies on statistical analysis and designs to identify and eliminate defects and for monitoring the result to control for future defects.

But my experience is just one needle in the haystack of the utility of mathematics and the value of mathematicians. So for young people who may be wondering about the utility of mathematics or what they can do with mathematics or what alternative careers are out there for someone who is adept at mathematics, the answer is: so many things. Mathematical dexterity can be leveraged into a successful career in law, finance, marketing, sales, polling, politics, economics, engineering, science, medicine, academics, public policy, banking, insurance and anything else you may want to be.

Sure, it’s true we need more engineers and mathematical teachers in our schools, but a strong love of mathematics doesn’t always have to lead to a career in engineering or full-time teaching. If every one of us with some interest in mathematics takes up a non-teaching career and then spend some time teaching in the classroom, we may have a better impact on the next generation of scholars and show them the value of loving the age-old faculty of counting.

Mathematics is a lovely language and mathematicians could easily be seen as the great poets they are. All others who take on mathematics induced careers like engineering, actuary science, performance management, financial engineering and econometrics, risk management, accounting and teaching are novelists, conjuring up great stories with a great language.

So what can you do with mathematics? I’ll say, “Everything.”

Dr. Wole Akpose is the Membership Development Chair for Region 2 and a member of the IEEE ITC&O and the Individual Benefit and Services Committee. He is the founder of HNT Solutions, a technology consulting company and a technology manager and occasional faculty member at Morgan State University.

Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.