Math, the last letter in the STEM acronym and the thing that might have made you cry at some point, is having a moment.
Last week Education Minister Simon Birmingham announced a 10-year plan to make mid-level math (i.e. 2 Unit) a prerequisite for STEM university courses across Australia, in an effort to turn around the country’s solid trend of dropping math at the earliest available opportunity.
Now the University of Sydney has released a list of 62 courses which will require you to suck it up and study math in order to apply, including subjects in Arts and Social Sciences, Business, Education and Social Work, Engineering and IT, Law, Music, Pharmacy, Science and Veterinary Science (get the full list here). The changes come into affect from 2019.
Professor Nalini Joshi, Chair of the National Committee for Mathematical Sciences at USyd, warned that if we didn’t get people who are going be using math in their day-to-day job to start *actually* studying it, we’re pretty much fucked, scientifically speaking.
“We are in the era of big data but what good is data without the ability to interpret and analyse it?” she said. “We need people who have the skills to take that raw information and turn it into something useful.
“Maths underpins just about everything – from the technology in your smartphone to the banking and financial systems that support our economy to how we measure and predict our health. Maths is also the cornerstone of all scientific endeavour – so if we are training new scientists without a good understanding of maths, Australian science will soon be in trouble.”
But it’s not all bad. These are the “sexy” jobs, according to Google‘s chief economist Hal Varian.
“I keep saying the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” he was quoted as saying in the government’s 10-year plan. “People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sex job of the 1990s?”
Source: SMH.
Photo: The Simpsons.
