Being a mathematician is a much better job that it was even 30 years ago, but doing mathematical research doesn’t pay as well as getting a recurring role on The West Wing. You can certainly make a lot of money using mathematical sophistication by running a hedge fund or coming up with exotic financial instruments (there is a well known mathematician that did the former, and friends of mine from grad school have done the latter), but it’s not “doing mathematics”. I know several people that love golf, and play quite often, but I don’t know anyone that tries to make a living at it. I do know quite a few professional mathematicians, and I’m not sure how many of them would continue in that line of work if they could make 5 or 10 times as much money doing something else that they enjoyed.

Finally, one reason that real applications of mathematics don’t make it into elementary textbooks is that real applications of mathematics always (in my experience, at least) require the use of a lot of mathematics. I’ve worked on quite a few problems in my career, and every one of them required that I invent something non-trivial.

The cover has a huge pink title, and looks like a typical issue of Sassy magazine for teenage girls, and is directed at middle school girls. Why that age? Because Miss Mckellar thinks that if you catch them young enough, they’ll keep their interest la…

So much for the renaissance man (or in this case, woman) .

My first mother-in-law was a biomedical researcher and my current husband is a “consulting professor” in engineering who used to be a full-time professor. It’s my impression that professors tend to put their names on papers written by their grad students; they’re unlikely to let undergrads put their names on the prof’s paper unless the students have contributed significantly.

This 1998 NSF report says “High school females are now more likely
than males to have taken geometry and algebra 2, and about
as likely to have completed calculus.”

Theorems are “co-authored”, articles in journals can be co-authored. The professor writes a paper and she’s allowed to put her name on it. I stand by my original assertion that if you love a field you stay in it.

Yet 90% of people will learn something more readily if they are given some idea of what it can be used for. So, bring on the applications, whether they are fashion, cookie-baking, investment analysis, or artillery fire control.