The graduates in Mathematics are very appreciated because of their creativity, mainstreaming and capacity to “think different”

They are everywhere. You can find them in the research groups that study cancer, the brain or develop artificial organs. The big supermarkets hire mathematicians to design their delivery routes and decide where to locate their storehouses. Banks and insurance companies ask them to create risk prediction models. Mathematicians create the algorithms of mobile applications, those that are applied to matrixes to know how to protect an ecosystem or those that regulate the temperature of incubators. 

Thanks to their mainstreaming, mathematicians are ranked as one of the jobs with lower unemployment figures in the statistics. This happens not only in Spain. Mathematicians top the list of the best professional careers in the United States. “The scientific and technological progress has given more importance to mathematicians because they make progress in any field of knowledge possible. They are an essential part of research in any discipline and their models are now more necessary than ever. This is the reason why they are demanded and valued by companies”, says Manuel de León, director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (Icmat) and researcher of CSIC. 

Google searches are possible thanks to algorithms, encrypted programmes work with prime numbers, the medical technologies for the cardio-vascular system are based on fluid equations, air routes are organised following the graph theory, the protection of the environment is designed from matrix theory... Mathematicians are the specialists who best know these issues. 

Nonetheless, specialists in human resources assure that mathematicians are not only valued because of their technical knowledge but also when they face challenges in multidisciplinary groups because they think “different”. 

“Because of the way they work during the bachelor’s degree (they have to solve problems using previous knowledge) and the complexity of mathematical concepts, it is easier for them to learn, abstract and deduce general concepts from particular issues. They have different ideas and suggest other ways of conducting tasks”, pointed out the mathematician Abel Pau of the Centro de Investigación Ecológica y Aplicaciones Forestales (Creaf).