Question: what sort of jobs can u get from maths that involve engineering? ciao!

Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 8 Jan 2020:

The short answer is: any job that has the word “engineer” in it (software engineer, hardware engineer, machine learning engineer etc.), the long answer is below.

The main job of engineers is to make approximations which are neither too loose neither too precise to solve a problem given some constraints (and how to make sure that the constrains are not violated e.g. how to avoid a fire if you suddenly manage to plug your phone directly in the mains socket without the USB adapter).

Math is the bread and butter of engineering. You need math to be able to represent the problem you are trying to solve on a piece of paper (or a computer) so that you can reason with it and understand which approximations are safe to do and which are not. As such, you can’t have engineering without math but you don’t need to be top expert in math to be an engineer as math is just a tool.

The kind of jobs you can get can vary within the big family of engineering degrees. You can became a civil engineer and build roads or buildings, or a mechanical engineers and design engines and cars and trains, or an airspace engineer and design aircraft.

You can get a job as electronics engineer and design all the circuits and electronics inside computers, cars, cameras etc. or a telecommunication engineer and create all sort of mobile, satellite or landline networks interconnecting mobiles, phones computers and even cars and industrial machines. Those two engineering have a lot of math which deals with changing representations of numbers. For example a audio sound is a wave. We don’t like working with wavy or curvy things very much in math as most of our math tools were designed for planes which are flat, so those engineers like to change the representation of numbers from waves (things that go up and down on a xy plane) to polar representations (still a xy plane but the x represents a frequency in Hertz and the y indicates how strong the signal with a given frequency x is).

Another engineering job which has a lot of math is control engineering. Those people will have to design things that move by themselves like assembly lines, conveyor belts, flying systems of aircraft or satellites etc. This engineering requires you to know a lot of advanced math because the dynamics of the motion of a mechanical system are very complex and will. Software engineering is a category of engineering that does not have a lot of math, but has a lot of programming and logic thinking which is related to math.

Then there is the wildcard: research engineer. Those are engineers that are doing a little bit of everything within a given domain but always new stuff. A robotics research engineer will be doing robotic related work trying out new things for example. To became a research engineer you definitively need to know math well but you also need to know about the specific job you will be doing because you obtained a PhD or you obtained a specialised degree on the discipline (or you had a relevant work experience before)