It’s official, it was on the front page of the NY Times yesterday : Statisticians are hot.  Google claims they have the sexiest jobs in the world and IBM is planning on hiring 4,000 of them.  They will have the pleasure to mine the enormous amounts of data that are being generated every day in our digital world.  We can no longer express the volumes in Giga, Tera or Peta bytes.  We’re up to the Exabytes now. 5 Exabytes can hold all words ever spoken by human beings.  We’ll probably need about 1,000 Exabytes to store all forms of data that will exist in 2010 – that’s a lot of data!!  And that’s an unbelievable playground for our mathematicians and statisticians.  They will trawl through it all to find the insights that will drive the next innovations in medicine, new product development, finance and marketing.

So where do we find these suddenly hot number crunchers?  Good question.  Here’s the problem.  Math and Stats have not exactly been the favorite topic of our students over the past couple of decades.  This is especially true in the US.  According to the OECD PISA test, which tests 15-year-old students in different countries, the US ranks 35^th in the world in terms of math literacy. In The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman outlined how the lack of engineering and math skills among the US population is having detrimental effects on US competitiveness in a global marketplace.  John Kao describes in Innovation Nation how the US math education system lags behind that of most other developed countries, most notably China.  And my own personal experience tells a similar story.  Most of the resumes I get for positions in the Ogilvy Analytics team are from mathematical talent who learned their skills outside the US (mostly in China and India).  Stricter Visa regulations have made it harder to hire this talent.  And foreign mathematicians are also less eager to leave the new prosperity of their countries of origin. 

The NY Times article will certainly make a handful of mathematicians and statisticians feel good about themselves.  But I really hope it will make math and stats cool again in the classrooms as well.