Looking for a career? You can count on maths

We are taking a look back at stories from Cosmos Magazine in print. Think you’re “just bad at maths” and can get by without it? And what do mathematicians actually spend their time doing? In this diverse exploration of what maths means to the world, in December 2023 Petra Stock talked to number professionals about their work, and why they’re not as odd as some might think.

Long-running television show 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown is an edgy spoof of a letters and numbers quiz.

Hosted by comedian Jimmy Carr, a rotating panel of comics compete, with maths providing the axis for numerous jokes and jibes.

In one episode, resident maths whiz Rachel Riley neatly solves a puzzle, organising a set of six numbers and operators (+, –, x and ÷) to make them equal 576. One of the comedians responds – to laughter and applause from the audience – “What happened to you? How did you become like this? How many friends have you got?”

According to mathematician-musician Alexander Hanysz, the show reflects wider attitudes and public perceptions about maths. The contestants are consistently “quite good at the words, they’re proud of it and they’re creative,” he says. “And then you get to the numbers, and people revel in being bad at it. I wish we could change this about the world.”

“I’m just bad at maths” has become the popular refrain, a self-fulfilling prophecy that people are naturally pre-disposed to words or numbers, but never both. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the public increasingly doesn’t want to do the maths, a fact borne out by statistics showing declining maths participation and performance in Australian children.

Unlike literacy skills, which are widely considered essential, the numeracy realm is regularly dismissed as an inborn ability (the idea of a ‘maths brain’ hardwired from birth): something that’s abstract, solitary and square, with limited career opportunities outside banking and teaching.

In fact, maths graduates are highly employable in a wide range of jobs, and their backgrounds and childhood skills are just as diverse. Is a lot of what we think about the field and its participants based on faulty calculations?

Maths: innate or learnt

Today Hanysz is employed at that maths-positive workplace the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the agency that casts its role as telling “the real story of Australia, its economy and its people by bringing life and meaning to numbers”.

After a first PhD attempt in his twenties “crashed and burned”, Hanysz spent more than a decade working as a full-time classical pianist, before returning to university for a second go.  

“If you talk about maths, people are scared of it… they think if you’re good at maths, you’re some kind of freak.”

From the abstract land of a pure maths PhD, Hanysz eventually found work in the practical world of the ABS. His day job involves sourcing independent, reliable data for telling Australia’s story through numbers. An example is an experimental indicator of household spending, drawing on aggregated and de-identified bank transaction data.

It might sound dry, but when Hanysz talks about maths, he leans in to the lyrical. “It’s simultaneously an art, a science, a game and philosophy,” bundled together with 3000 years of history, he explains. Nonetheless, in most social situations, Hanysz avoids talking about the subject he loves. It makes people uncomfortable, he says, so he talks about music instead.

“I find if you talk about maths, people are scared of it. You get the stories about how people were so bad at maths at high school. Or they think if you’re good at maths, you’re some kind of freak.” 

Hanysz describes his pathway into maths as a “succession of lucky accidents”. And contrary to the popular misconception that maths ability is innate, many mathematicians recall challenges along the way.

Professor of mathematics at the University of Tasmania, Barbara Holland, always liked maths, and grew up with the benefit of “two geeky parents who were both high school teachers”, but she says things weren’t always smooth sailing.

When she was 14, Holland remembers getting viral pneumonia and missing a month of school. She returned to class just in time to face an end-of-unit test in trigonometry.

“And I’m like: what’s trigonometry?” she says. “Why is everyone chanting ‘SohCahToa’ like they’ve joined some weird cult or something?” 

Holland did miserably in the assessment, and found herself completely floundering. But thanks to the support of another teacher who was willing to help struggling students, she caught up. 

Two lessons from that formative experience have stayed with her. The first is the way in which one good teacher can make a difference in someone’s life. The second, that there need to be easier ways for students to catch up. 

“Maths is so linear when you learn it in school,” Holland says. “If you miss some essential building block then it makes everything else quite difficult.” 

It’s a sentiment shared by Dr Alexandra Hogan, a mathematical epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales. Hogan has spent the last few years writing equations to model the spread of COVID-19: what proportion of the population is susceptible, infectious or recovered, and how limited vaccine supplies might be fairly rolled out for maximum public health benefit. During the pandemic, she worked as part of a large team using science and maths to inform policy, including providing evidence to bodies like the World Health Organization to use in their vaccine planning.

She says that like many people, she found maths at school “really hard”. But she ultimately persevered thanks to the help of supportive teachers and university lecturers. “It wasn’t an easy thing to do. It was really difficult. But I stuck at it, because I still enjoyed it. And I realised that it’s okay to find things hard and you don’t have to succeed every time.”

Luckily, persevering with maths pays off, sometimes in unexpected ways.

More than numbers

Surveys of parents, educators and career advisors by the Australian government’s Youth in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) study suggest limited awareness of the potential career paths available from studying subjects like maths or science.

When 730 teachers and career advisors were invited to list as many STEM-related careers they could think of, the top response was teacher or educator (14%). When parents were asked a similar question, the highest response was engineer (11%).

Growing up in South Africa, with a father who was a Hungarian refugee, Dr Éva Plagányi saw maths as a universal language. She always enjoyed maths at school, yet couldn’t picture it as a career. “I had this idea that mathematicians would end up sitting in a little room working on problems all day. I didn’t want that, because I was quite an outdoors person,” she says.

She remembers one teacher saying, “you’re going to have a job in mathematics one day … you’re going to be a bank teller.” 

When she took this information home, Plagányi’s father told her instead of counting money, perhaps she could be a scientist. At university Plagányi studied zoology, botany and applied mathematics, even though “I had no idea what I would actually do with the mathematics”. 

She remembers seeing books in the library about how the Fibonacci series can describe the petals of flowers. “I thought: Well, that’s great, but it’s not very exciting.” 

In her second year, a lecturer spoke about using maths to model antelope populations to assist with conservation efforts. Plagányi says: “I still remember rushing to his office and saying … ‘That’s what I want to do!’” 

Today, she works with the CSIRO using maths and biology to solve complex, real-world problems about resource use and conservation. Much of her day job involves managing fisheries, combining data collected from the field with equations describing how fish populations change in the ocean. There’s no single right answer, but her models can be used to test options and guide decisions on management strategies like fishing quotas, which try to balance the needs of people and the environment.

“For example, if you’re harvesting krill, you want to leave enough to ensure that whale populations are healthy,” she says.  

A large part of Plagányi’s role involves communicating with others, explaining the models to policymakers, and stakeholders like Traditional Owners or fishers who are directly impacted by the results of her work. She emphasises that’s why it’s so important to ensure the models are meaningful, and to have confidence in their results.

“If you get the numbers wrong, you could close a fishery. That’s people’s livelihood,” she says.

Plagányi’s job weaves together her loves of maths, nature and the ocean, and she gets to travel, work with people and spend plenty of time outdoors. But for a long time, she couldn’t see anybody using maths in that way: unlike doctor, lawyer or the ever-popular marine biologist, few can picture a career in maths beyond the limited options of bank teller or maths teacher.

When Kate Simms was at school, plenty of older people warned her against pursuing further study in maths, even though it was her favourite subject.

Happily, for Simms, she ignored their advice. She now works on modelling the impact of cervical cancer prevention strategies like vaccination and screening at The Daffodil Centre, a joint venture between the University of Sydney and the Cancer Council – and she still loves the adrenaline rush of solving an interesting problem.

Simms says her university maths cohort have all ended up in diverse careers – everything from cryptography to modelling internet speeds, from public service to finance.

 “The skill set and the way of thinking is so flexible, useful in so many different ways … Even though there’s not necessarily a defined job, maybe one of the reasons for that is because there’s so many jobs,” she says.

Professor Tim Marchant from the University of Melbourne agrees. The director of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute says students – and especially their parents and career advisers – need to know that even though there might not be many jobs labelled ‘mathematician’, the market for maths graduates is absolutely booming, with the starting salary for many roles at around $100,000 a year.

“Jobs involving data science, financial mathematics – there’s not enough maths graduates to fill those jobs,” he says. 

Marchant lists sectors where strong quantitative skills are in high demand: big technology companies, economics and finance, medical fields, engineering. So much of the modern world is now governed by data that numeracy skills are in high demand.

And it’s not only quantitative skills employers are after. Recently Holland noticed that many of her maths PhD students were ending up in government and social services jobs.  

“A world without maths? There’d be no time, no baking, no page numbers in books, no sports scores, no travel or navigation.”

“I was rung up a few times to give a reference,” she says.  After a sequence of successful candidates, Holland couldn’t help but ask the person on the end of the line: “This isn’t necessarily the sort of job you’d think a maths graduate would get. What attracts you to maths PhD students in these sorts of roles?” 

“Well, they’re so resilient to being stuck,” the recruiter replied. 

Holland reflects that’s probably because “a lot of the time in maths being stuck is the natural state”. “To try and creatively think your way out of a problem and see it from a different angle is often what helps you make progress.” 

Gains and losses

Mathematicians might be applying their craft to solving problems from evolution to economics, public health to environmental management. But what about the rest of us? Do we really need maths?

The ready acceptance of being “just bad at maths”, is underpinned by a pervasive view that we can get by in life without it.

But it’s not only the mathematicians, engineers or data analysts who need numeracy skills.

Video game designers and programmers use maths to present everything that appears on screens, from the tiniest pixel to vast virtual worlds.

Craft brewers measure water, hops and barley to achieve the perfect flavour profile, and use calculations to estimate heat and alcohol content.

Social media influencers analyse data to measure engagement and maximise reach.

Fashion designers and carpenters rely on geometry.

Name a task and it probably involves maths.

In fact, research suggests people with poor numeracy skills, particularly women, experience more disadvantages in life.

A large-scale longitudinal study in the UK by researchers Samantha Parsons and John Bynner followed a sample of people born in 1958 and 1970 – about 17,000 in each cohort – through to adult life.

By the time people entered their 30s, those with poor numeracy skills were more likely to experience depression and have difficulty ­f­­inding and maintaining employment compared to those considered to have competent maths ability.

They also found a correlation between women with poor numeracy skills and substantial socioeconomic disadvantage – in terms of employment, physical health and a sense of control over their lives – regardless of their levels of literacy.

Parsons and Bynner conclude: “Poor numeracy skills make it difficult to function effectively in all areas of modern life, particularly for women.”

Maths is fundamental to our everyday existence. A world without maths? There’d be no time, no baking, no page numbers in books, no sports scores, no travel or navigation.

No understanding of atoms and density, no rockets, no bridges.

No symmetry. No poetry. No music.

Beyond the practical and pragmatic, maths can offer a measured perspective on the world.

Hogan says maths training helps you think about things in a quantitative way, assessing evidence and making objective decisions. “That’s an incredibly useful skill to have”.

Plagányi likes the way maths reduces complexity in the world. It’s a structured, consistent way of explaining everything in nature.

Hanysz asks: can you imagine a school system where people had never heard of Shakespeare? And no one was ever encouraged to go for a run, or jump in a swimming pool?

“It’s part of our culture,” he says. “The ability to do maths is part of what makes us human.”