More on the Shortage of Mathematicians

Geekpress supplies another great article on the impact of mathematicians on the modern marketplace, and the high demand for new math graduates. According to this geekpress linked Businessweek article:
From fledglings like Inform to tech powerhouses such as IBM (IBM ), companies are hitching mathematics to business in ways that would have seemed fanciful even a few years ago. In the past decade, a sizable chunk of humanity has moved its work, play, chat, and shopping online. We feed networks gobs of digital data that once would have languished on scraps of paper -- or vanished as forgotten conversations. These slices of our lives now sit in databases, many of them in the public domain. From a business point of view, they're just begging to be analyzed. But even with the most powerful computers and abundant, cheap storage, companies can't sort out their swelling oceans of data, much less build businesses on them, without enlisting skilled mathematicians and computer scientists.

The rise of mathematics is heating up the job market for luminary quants, especially at the Internet powerhouses where new math grads land with six-figure salaries and rich stock deals. Tom Leighton, an entrepreneur and applied math professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says: "All of my students have standing offers at Yahoo! (YHOO ) and Google (GOOG )." Top mathematicians are becoming a new global elite. It's a force of barely 5,000, by some guesstimates, but every bit as powerful as the armies of Harvard University MBAs who shook up corner suites a generation ago.

Read it all.

In a previous posting, I mentioned the competition for top mathematicians, and linked to an article dealing with the competition between the US NSA, and GOOGLE for math geeks. The article mentioned that in private sector jobs, the sex disparity in hires is significant, but in the NSA jobs the gender disparity is much less. Remember the big hoopla at Harvard about the sex differences in hiring for top level math and physics professors? Does anyone really believe that Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Google, Yahoo, IBM, Bell Labs, and all the other elite corporations and institutions would hire more males in these jobs just out of sexism?