Major & Career Planning
Mathematics/Statistics

Overview

Those who are interested in university teaching must not be easily discouraged by the competition they face.

You can also earn money by grading papers for the mathematics department or you might be hired as a tutor in the Math Lab.

Euclid, a Greek geometrician, circa 300 B.C.E. Wrote The Elements which served as the "Bible" of geometry for 2200 years.

Hypatia, a Greek mathematician, 355-415 C.E. Considered by many to be the first female mathematician of note.

Rene Descartes, a French philosopher and mathematician, 1596-1650. Credited with the creation of analytic geometry.

Sir Isaac Newton, an English philosopher and mathematician, 1642- 1727. Invented calculus.

Leonard Euler, a Swiss mathematician, 1707-1783. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians. Papers written by hime were still being published long after his death.

Maria Agnesi, an Italian mathematician, 1718-1799. She wrote one of the first, and best, calculus texts as an aid for her brothers' education.

Sonya Kovalevsky, a Russian mathematician, 1850-1891 She developed an interest in mathematics when she read the lecture notes in mathematics used to paper her bedroom.

David Hilbert, a German mathematician, 1862-1942. He is most remembered for the twenty-three problems he posed in 1900 (see More Information & Resources below). Hilbert also wrote the first significant revision of Euclid's Elements.

Emmy Noether, a German mathematician, 1882-1935. She was an outstanding algebraist who fled to this country from Nazi Germany.

Paul Erdös, a Hungarian mathematician, 1913-1996. He was a world traveler who's publication list exceeds 1500 papers.
 

The first problem was solved that same year by Max Dehn. As of today, fourteen more have been solved. Recent solutions of problems have been given by Kolmogorov (1957), Nagata (1958) and Matiyasevic (1970). Eight of the problems remain unsolved. Perhaps the solution for the next one will come from a student at Wichita State University.

Applied Mathematics. If you work in the area of applied mathematics, you will try to develop theories and techniques that solve the problems in your organization, investigating how to express the situation in mathematical terms, how to use your knowledge of mathematics to find a solution. You could do this in an engineering project (on an airplane, a bridge, a building) or in scientific research (the effectiveness of a new drug), or in industry (how to make the greatest profit, how to lay out a new plant building, how to increase the efficiency of the production line, etc.) or in research and development (to extend the knowledge in a particular business or find new ways to use the information that is already known).

If you choose to be a statistician, you will use mathematical theories to collect and analyze numerical information and to estimate unknown quantities. You will plan and design surveys in one of many fields (Neilsen ratings, Dow-Jones averages, psychological experiments, Gallup polls, etc.).

Actuaries for insurance companies must have a strong mathematics background to design insurance and pension plans that are financially sound. Here you would collect and analyze the statistics needed to calculate the chances of death, sickness, injury, unemployment, retirement, etc. You will also compute the premiums the company must ask in order to pay the claims that are brought to them over the years.

Teaching, at either the high school or college level, requires (in addition to competency in the field) a dedication that will help you obtain a suitable position in the face of the large number of other applicants for the same job.

A bachelor's degree is essential for first level jobs in mathematics and graduate work is usually required for any promotions or advancements. Many positions require a knowledge in other areas (engineering, management, teaching, etc.) plus the ability to communicate, since you must explain your findings as you report them back to non-mathematicians. For this reason, an ability to write well is highly regarded.

Pure (Theoretical) Mathematics. If you should work in the area of pure or theoretical mathematics (although this usually requires a Ph.D. degree) you will be searching for new principles and/or new relationships between existing principles in an effort to enlarge the field of mathematics. You will want to increase the world's basic knowledge of mathematics, without necessarily knowing what the practical applications might be. You will probably be employed by a university or a research organization, such as the National Bureau of Standards.

At Wichita State, you will work toward either (1) a Bachelor of Arts degree, (2) a Bachelor of Arts degree for teaching at the high school level, (3) a Bachelor of Science degree or (4) a Bachelor of Science degree with an emphasis in statistics. All four sequences require at least one course in computer science and over twenty semester hours of mathematics above the 500 level. Many courses include examples of the use of various concepts found in actual professional situations (numerical analysis and statistics are good examples). Each year you will be able to hear recognized mathematicians who are brought in by the department: recent speakers have come from the University of Nebraska, Ohio State and Washington State University. Mathematics majors who enroll in Mathematics 380, a seminar for one hour of credit, get to know each other better as they start talking about their field. You can enjoy solving problems together in an atmosphere more like a student club than a classroom.