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Ask HN: Developer roles that require advanced maths?

by throwaway423342 on 4/3/19, 12:12 PM with 2 comments

Are there developer roles that require advanced maths? I know that machine learning and AI require relatively advanced maths but I personally am not quite interested in it. Quant developer is another role I know that requires advanced mathematical thinking but I often wonder if it's really meaningful apart from providing some liquidity. What are other roles that a programmer could potentially transition to that requires advanced maths?

A bit of background about myself: I’ve been in the industry for 7 years and have worked on low level messaging system, rails backend, and more recently frontend web apps with React. I love learning new things but after 7 years it seems on the technology side, I’m not seeing anything that interests me to a large extent, on the backend or the frontend. I’m recently considering obtaining a maths degree via Open university, it’s a huge undertake but I’m willing to put in the effort. I also did well in the maths courses when I majored in CS in college. The real issue is time though. I don’t see myself context switching between day job as an app developer, and going back home studying maths at night. My experience while switching from backend to frontend developer made me believe learning on the job is a very effective way. Thus I’m looking for a job where advanced maths is required as well as programming skills. Thanks!

  • by mfworks on 4/3/19, 2:00 PM

    In general, a good place to start is, "Working on tools or engines that other developers use to do really cool things."

    - Graphics engines like Unity

    - Cryptography

    - AI, ML, or predictive Analytics

    - Image Computing (either medical image computing software, like MRI image parsers, or Image / Video editing, like Photoshop)

    - Mathematical Computing Toolkits like MATLAB

    Generally speaking, if it requires a lot of computing power to perform, there's a good chance a lot of math goes into making it.

  • by NonEUCitizen on 4/3/19, 12:36 PM

    There are companies such as Wolfram (Mathematica), Mathworks (MATLAB), or COMSOL (COMSOL Multiphysics). There are many other companies that build software for Engineers and Scientists. Just make sure to get a job working on the real guts of these software (rather than say, touching up the UI or import/export filters). You'd probably need to know a lot of math to get these jobs though.