What maths do you use in your job?

[DreamingofBrie]

A few years ago, a teacher started a brilliant thread on MN, asking posters whether they used maths in their job, and if so what job they did. The thread had hundreds of responses and it was great to see the diversity of the replies - I've used those responses in my classroom to show pupils how maths is used in jobs that they might not have thought of. Replies included a pilot, QC, nail technician, mediator, charity worker, SAHM, computer network programmer, chef, dancer, sports performance coach and many many more.

I'm a Maths teacher, so I use all sorts of maths in my job every day . I'm hoping for more interesting replies from this thread, so that I can update the display in my classroom!

Thanks in advance!

I work in HR, and use maths for payroll calculations, holiday entitlements, working hours, % for staff turnover reports, sickness absence reports, and use excel extensively for budgeting.

Personal assistant, deal with expenses and invoices.
Married to an Actuary who uses maths every single day, good job he loves it :-)

Eccles there's probably quite an overlap in the maths we use! Matrix transformations have cropped up rather a lot for me.

Think school children might be rather intrigued by crystals as an aid to introducing the concept of symmetry - along with the wallpaper patterns of the Alhambra palace of course.

I work in retail, so thankfully only have to use basic adding and subtracting. The till or head office does any reductions for me. I do have to say that I have (undiagnosed) dyscalculia and really struggle with even basic stuff. I always double count, as I can get really odd answers even when using a calculator. All the stuff I 'learned' in school I never use. I can't remember it, and couldn't remember it at the time. Fine while I was doing it, but the moment I stopped doing something, I couldn't remember how to.

I'm currently on maternity leave and use maths when I'm baking. For example, if I have a recipe for a 20cm diameter round cake tin and I have 20x20 square tin, I use pi to work out the surface area of the round tin, and use percentage calculations to scale the ingredients accordingly to fit the surface area of the square tin.

I work in a press office.

I hated maths at school.

For my job (which is mainly words based) I use percentages a lot to calculate open and click through rates and that's about it. And that's enough!

I run an aerial company training people in various aerial arts for fitness and wellbeing (think Anne Wheeler in greatest showman, the ladies on the silks at the Brit awards, pink and her aerial hoop) - As well as the obvious use of maths to pay invoices, calculate student return rates, work out profit/loss on running sessions to decide a price point, but also I need to calculate load factors every day to work out if a beam or frame will support a certain number of people doing static work or drops. I never thought I'd need to calculate loads after I left school!

I'm a medical imaging physicist so maths is everywhere. I do image processing, quality assurance calculations, stats of quantitative data, doses of contrast agents, mathematical modelling of contrast uptakes and disease changes over time, safety parameter checks... and more (I let the computers do the Fourier Transforms! ;)

I'm a risk manager in an investment bank. I use maths for calculating exposures and limits. Some complex financial modelling underneath, but you have to understand enough to challenge them.
Pricing, revenue calculations which are usually done on a percentage basis, profit margins.

I love coming onto this thread at the end of a day and seeing all of the new replies. So many different jobs listed and also, I'm heartened to see so many jobs in STEM too.

I'm a supply teacher so teach maths in primary schools from foundation stage up to y6.

The other week I was in when the forest schools tutor came in to do the lesson. In a previous role he was a landscape designer and showed some plans he'd created as part of that - it involved accurate measuring and recording them before drawing a scale model of the area he was landscaping, including plotting where trees and telegraph poles were using triangulation. He then used those to draw up plans, both as a bird's eye view and when viewed at ground level. He'd then have to work out costings, amounts of materials required etc in order to provide an accurate quote for the job.

After that lesson I talked to the class about how much maths was used in that job, how they'd enjoyed doing it (they were creating scale models from measurements they'd taken the week before) and that it proved that maths does indeed have a point.

I also do photography as a hobby and use maths in that to work out how long to leave the shutter open at different aperture sizes when I'm shooting in manual. If I then put a filter on that, which reduces the amount of light reaching the sensor by X amount of stops, I then have to recalculate the shutter speed, which is measured in fractions of a second as well as whole seconds (and if it's going to be longer than 30sec then the camera can't work it out for me).

photosbypassy.com/?p=700 this explains the maths involved in working out aperture sizes. Admittedly, I don't use this when I'm opening up or closing down the aperture, but it's useful to understand what the f-numbers mean and how it affects the light and the amount of the scene that will be in focus.

When composing my photo I'm thinking of things such as symmetry, angles and shapes of whatever I'm looking at whether they look nice or interesting together.
When getting the image ready to print I have to crop or enlarge it to fit a certain aspect ratio.

My hobby is gardening and I need to be able to work out how much gravel I need to cover a certain area and a particular depth, or how much compost I will need to repot x number of seedlings. I also need to know the number of bottles of liquid fertiliser to buy, based on the total volume of compost in pots, their water-holding capacity, the frequency they will need watering, the differing ratios of NPK chemicals in fertilisers that we use at different times of year - oh and I need to keep a close eye on the outside temperature and windspeed, so plants can be protected from damage. It is amazing how much more water plants get through when it is windy.

Selling blinds, curtains etc. Lots of converting inches into cm and vice versa. Trying to work out what customer needs from their sketches, taking into account all the fittings etc. Also curtain hemming as we offer that. Bathroom fittings. etc. Not easy for me with dyscalculia but I refuse to let it defeat me!

214 posts in and I have just copied everything to Word, so I copy all of the quotes into speech bubbles for my display, when I come to revamp it. Please do add more if you can!

I am self-employed now and work with clients in different countries and I have to work out calculations like:

If I earn $30 an hour and work 20 hours a week, the freelance platform takes 24% on first $500 and 12% above that amount. Then I have to exchange the money into pounds - what is the exchange rate and commission and how much is left in pounds.

I am currently doing a project where I am calculating growth rates of OECD, UK, US and EU15 pre and post the financial crisis and comparing the difference in annual average GDP growth rates. Just had to make a chart of the data.

I'm sat at home cutting a cake.
In half, each bit in half again , once more in half. So I have eight lots..

Working out holidays, pay etc pro rata

Working out discounts and percentages eg if I let a customer take a display item with view to buy, how much will Bargain Corner (this does give away where I work!) will charge them, to give them a rough idea before they trundle down there (big store!)

Space management
eg I have this amount of space but two palettes coming in to fill it, Will it or what percentage should I ask to be held back, or how do I make the space

Also, justifiying space and cost... eg does this space justify this amount of product going into it for sale (this I only used as a charity shop manager- also used cumulative figures which was the first time since leaving school)

As a charity shop manager I also had to hand draw graphs..again first time since school. Being in my 40s it did throw me! Also pie charts and reading figures and comparing to the last years, etc, collating this info, turning it into percentages etc, whether we were up or down... I can honestly say this was the most my schoolgirl maths was ever put into practise. I did find it hard as had forgotten so much! (I have dyscalculia) There was a lot of admin and it was all handwritten so can't just assume it's all going to be on a computer...and this is for a huge UK charity too!

Hello everyone,

Just returning to this thread to let you know that I've created the resource from the brilliant contributions to this thread now, thank you!

It's available for free on TES, so let me know if you'd like the link.

I put a quote onto our departmental Twitter feed every so often too, they seem to go down well!

I'm a solicitor. Some of the ways I use maths are:

Calculating probabilities

Calculating figures with and without VAT

Calculating simple and compound interest

I use basic arithmetic to calculate fees at an hourly rate at that's about it. All my maths lessons after about age 11 were a total waste of time.

I’m a Portage Home Visitor (kind of like a Health Visitor but for education for children with SEND age 0-3). I do counting from 0-5, maybe up to 10 for those who are interested, number recognition and shapes, patterns, sorting etc. I’m not sure I have the kind of job you’re after though 😂 (even though it’s the best job in the world!)

I’m a post-doc with a PhD in statistics. I was always in the lowest sets for maths and got a C at GCSE. Studied economics at undergrad level where I discovered a talent and love for using modeling to make sense of data. I use maths daily to search for patterns and predictors of disease. It’s fascinating and creative and the aim to predict disease at an individual level in order to develop personalized medicines. It’s the best job in the world!
PS I still count on my fingers!