How to earn a massive income through Mathematics.

[Wesc]

Hi all, I'm a student in Mathematical Science in which I'm specialising in Mathematics and a little Computer Programming. I love Maths and definitely have a flair for it. I'm also extremely ambitious and am massively motivated by money, I love it. :P Ideally I'd be earning over 250k or even more per annum. However I'm struggling to find the best ideal career path for me to go down. It seems investment banking and similar jobs in the financial sector seem to be my best bet, however my knowledge of finance is fairly limited, although I do find economics interesting. There is Actuarial finance but it doesn't excite me that much TBH. As for entrepreneurship I'm not as keen because of the huge risks involved, but who knows!

Anyways, does anyone have any opinions? All replies would be very much appreciated!

 

[D H]

Anyways, does anyone have any opinions?

My first thought on seeing posts like this, and we see lots of them: Don't be so greedy. My next thought is to be realistic.

If you want to get moderately rich, working in finance is currently one possibility. The financial industry hasn't learned much from the last collapse, mainly because the repercussions have been few. Don't count on that should there be another major economic screwup by the financial industry.

If you want to get fantastically rich, well you're not going to do that by working for someone else. You need to create something that is of such fantastic value that people will pay you a fantastic sum.

 

[analogdesign]

If you want to get fantastically rich, well you're not going to do that by working for someone else. You need to create something that is of such fantastic value that people will pay you a fantastic sum.

This is good advice. If you want to be rich, you have to take the risk and do the hard work. I would evaluate my goals, though. Is money really everything?

 

[AlephZero]

I think you are looking for a solution with too many constraints. If you want loadsamoney,, forget about the "math" and "career" parts and just focus on the money.

D.H's "create something that is of such fantastic value that people will pay you a fantastic sum." isn't the only way. If you can persuade 1 million suckers (oops, customers) to pay you a dollar for something they didn't know they wanted till you sold it to them, you are well on your way. That's only one person in 7,000 of the current world population. What's hard about that?

 

[jk]

Prove the Riemann Hypothesis. There's a million bucks waiting for you

 

[russ_watters]

How fast do you want to achieve a 250k/yr salary? Essentially nothing right out of undergrad can get you that, but after 10 or 20 years, there are an awful lot of ways to.

 

[SteamKing]

How do you become a millionaire? First, get your hands on a million dollars. Yuck, yuck!

 

[Wesc]

How fast do you want to achieve a 250k/yr salary? Essentially nothing right out of undergrad can get you that, but after 10 or 20 years, there are an awful lot of ways to.

Oh there's no immediate rush, but hopefully by my early 30s. I spoke to my father's friend who had a masters in mathematics, began her career in Accenture and worked her way up to being a partner. She was earning 7 figures. :P Although I know that's a rare feat it's something that I'd aspire to do.
But the entrepeneurial path does seem exciting albeit quite daunting! Perhaps I'd work under an employer in my 20s, get to know the industry as well as making good relations, and all the while try to come up with a business idea. How does that sound? :P

 

[jtbell]

Ideally I'd be earning over 250k or even more per annum.

Move to Japan. 250K yen should be no problem at all.

 

[analogdesign]

Oh there's no immediate rush, but hopefully by my early 30s. I spoke to my father's friend who had a masters in mathematics, began her career in Accenture and worked her way up to being a partner. She was earning 7 figures. :P Although I know that's a rare feat it's something that I'd aspire to do.
But the entrepeneurial path does seem exciting albeit quite daunting! Perhaps I'd work under an employer in my 20s, get to know the industry as well as making good relations, and all the while try to come up with a business idea. How does that sound? :P

It sounds to me like a one-way ticket to an unsatisfying life.

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

Move to Japan. 250K yen should be no problem at all.

:thumbs:

 

[Jufro]

Prove the Riemann Hypothesis. There's a million bucks waiting for you

I lol'd

 

[zeralda21]

Prove the Riemann Hypothesis. There's a million bucks waiting for you

And then you have 5 more to go, making a total of 6 million dollars.

 

[reenmachine]

If you want to make 250-350k a year the academic way , become a MD and get a specialty.

 

[jasonRF]

One approach is the marry rich; rich people are no harder to love than poor ones (ha ha).

More seriously, earning that kind of income not easy and will not necessarily lead you to the happiest life. The few people I know that likely earn in that range seem to do very little except work.

jason

 

[member 428835]

stop math and become a medical doctor

 

[meanrev]

I'll be critical.

$250k per annum is a small amount. You can make it through a variety of means - being an underwear model, a children's book writer, a makeup artist, an eBay store owner, a web forum manager, a daytrading coach, a wastewater recycling startup founder, a network traffic consultant, a restaurant owner. I know a multi-millionaire for each of the above jobs, half of whom were mathematics majors. You can do any of the above with a mathematical science degree with a computer science background. In fact, it's an edge that you have a mathematical background in a field that lacks quantitative expertise, because there's more low-lying fruit. So finance is, in some ways, your worst bet if your goal is to make a lot of money. (Not to mention that you probably have a long way to go if you associate economics with finance.)

I know a firm that pays $170k for a B.Sc in math fresh out of college, but that means you have to compete with hundreds of applicants for a couple of positions, and you need to compete with ten thousand people with the same background as you while you try to get promoted to that $250k per year. (And if your degree is in 'Mathematical Science' and not 'Mathematics', chances are that your resume will get trashed before it gets read.)

Many people claim to be motivated by money when they really aren't willing to work as hard for it as they think they will. They're interested in shortcuts, how to avoid risk, how to make it with the least effort. You asked in the title, "How to earn a massive income" but you're really asking for "What jobs earn a massive income?" This is the sort of question they ask. It's probably the laziest mindset if one is hoping that having a particular type of job entitles one to a particular income.

Another piece of advice: It's perfectly noble to have a dream of making a lot of money, and some of the people I respect the most tell me upfront that their lifelong dream is to make a lot of money. But if that's the case, you should aim for something substantial, like $100 billion.

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

I'll be critical.

$250k per annum is a small amount. You can make it through a variety of means - being an underwear model, a children's book writer, a makeup artist, an eBay store owner, a web forum manager, a daytrading coach, a wastewater recycling startup founder, a network traffic consultant, a restaurant owner. I know a multi-millionaire for each of the above jobs, half of whom were mathematics majors. You can do any of the above with a mathematical science degree with a computer science background. In fact, it's an edge that you have a mathematical background in a field that lacks quantitative expertise, because there's more low-lying fruit. So finance is, in some ways, your worst bet if your goal is to make a lot of money. (Not to mention that you probably have a long way to go if you associate economics with finance.)

I know a firm that pays $170k for a B.Sc in math fresh out of college, but that means you have to compete with hundreds of applicants for a couple of positions, and you need to compete with ten thousand people with the same background as you while you try to get promoted to that $250k per year. (And if your degree is in 'Mathematical Science' and not 'Mathematics', chances are that your resume will get trashed before it gets read.)

Many people claim to be motivated by money when they really aren't willing to work as hard for it as they think they will. They're interested in shortcuts, how to avoid risk, how to make it with the least effort. You asked in the title, "How to earn a massive income" but you're really asking for "What jobs earn a massive income?" This is the sort of question they ask. It's probably the laziest mindset if one is hoping that having a particular type of job entitles one to a particular income.

Another piece of advice: It's perfectly noble to have a dream of making a lot of money, and some of the people I respect the most tell me upfront that their lifelong dream is to make a lot of money. But if that's the case, you should aim for something substantial, like $100 billion.

What's noble in being greedy? p.s I know you were cynical, but even then, I don't understand all these people with their dreams of making billions of dollars.

 

[meanrev]

What's noble in being greedy? p.s I know you were cynical, but even then, I don't understand all these people with their dreams of making billions of dollars.

I respect anyone who can make the relentless commitment to a single goal.

I knew one guy who had the genetic gift of being very popular with the opposite sex but didn't want to spend time with them for he thought it would get in the way of his business. He didn't have a personal Facebook, phone, or instant messaging account, because he thought those were distractions - so I could only get in touch with him through his business phone.

I was invited to stay with him at his vacation home once and he would sleep 3-4 hours, get up to study for his merchant license exam (during that time, he was transforming his company to import a specific kind of material), and watch the markets, even though it was meant to be a vacation. We'd talk about the market over any conversation that we had a chance to.

He told me that he recalled his first deal was at age 5, to sell a genuine Mercedes toy car for a few hundred euros. It was a birthday gift from his dad, and he sold it without a wince of feeling to his dad's friend who wanted to get something for his own kid. Since then, his lifelong goal was to make no less than 100M euros. He worked single-mindedly towards that goal and got to within 1 magnitude of that by age 21 and the time of his high school reunion, but despite all of that, he didn't let his high school classmates know, lived extremely modestly, and wouldn't spend more than 5 euros per day on himself without complaining.

I don't think there's anything less noble about just wanting to accumulate 100M euros as there is about wanting to climb the Mt Everest or to trek to the South Pole or place a flag on the Moon. Either can be seen as an excess, if you asked me. (e.g. If you had spent all that effort climbing the Mt Everest solving a climate change problem instead, you might have done more for society... but people still think highly of the person who climbed the Mt Everest but not of the person who made 100M euros.) Not to mention, people seem to misunderstand the dynamics of making 100M euros. Being greedy, corrupt, anti-competitive and frauding your way to 100M is probably the exception, not the norm. I've had to work with many billionaires in my line of work and I could say that 95% of them lived modestly and worked honestly, and were compensated in the fair amount for the work that they had contributed to our society.

 

[meanrev]

I've had to work with many billionaires in my line of work and I could say that 95% of them lived modestly and worked honestly, and were compensated in the fair amount for the work that they had contributed to our society.

I've to add another point.

I've also had to meet many Ivy League grads in my line of work who were not extremely well-off, but wanted the shortcuts to financial wealth. I don't know which comes as a consequence of the other, but I have an anecdote to offer.

One kid worked with me on my startup and he had poor work ethic and quit eventually, saying that he was expecting more meaningful work than optimizing 100 lines of code that were optimized over and over again in the course of a week, especially not for zero pay. He wanted to do cutting edge research in quantum cryptography, and he got what he wanted after leaving us. And he did mention that the professor was offering him minimum wage while we had no money to pay him in the startup. Okay.

Of course, 3 months later, a few people appreciated our work, and everyone in my startup who was doing this sort of meaningless work became a millionaire.

(My philosophical take on this is that the more meaningless you find the work, the less people want to do it since other people think the same way, and so the more you'll get compensated for doing the work that you find meaningless.) The market is very efficient in compensating people for the value they add to it.