My interests are highly varied; too many to list quickly. At the moment it's on the job search. How do you subtly get the information you need from would be employers so they like you enough to talk to you about an interview.
I found a company Crimson Hexagon (CH), that I'm curious about. The thing that caught my attention was the way they wrote their job posting. Usually, posting read like an HR drone wrote it. Pretty boring and to me a clear sign that the company is large enough to have a sizable HR department and relatively little room for creativity. But! CH had a very personable post. They said they were looking for people with expertise and interest in several areas. The one that caught my attention was "statistics, mathematics and the R programming language". Just the kinds of thing for me.
Stats was my favorite math class. First, because I had a teacher who was really really good. Second, stats gave me a new set of tools for thinking about the world. I read a book called Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He said something that has stuck with me. He said Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute. I prefer this approach above the Math is cool for the sake of Math's coolness approach. Now granted, Math is cool. But it is far cooler when it can actually be applied to something.
1 comment:
I agree. I think Nassim meant that Math was essentially a tool use to think of abstract ideas. Have you read the "The Black Swan" is his best book. And not to burst your bubble with your love for statistics but Nassim pretty much pummels the field, specially when use in the wrong way in the financial markets. However, it's niffity to know it when it comes to physics and Brownian movement.
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