1000. A Day in the Life: What's It Really Like to Be a Mathematician or Statistician?

“What I would love to do in the next 10 years or so is focus very much on getting underrepresented minorities in general and African Americans in particular, more interested in mathematics. I personally love math and I want as many people as I can to take as many math classes as they can. I know that there are a lot of underrepresented minorities that are very nervous about questions such as: What kind of career could I have in math? Might I make more money being an engineer or a doctor? What are some of the specific career opportunities I might have? And I definitely want to spend time explaining what those opportunities are and much more.”

Edray Herber Goins is Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College. He has worked as a researcher at both Harvard and the National Security Agency, and has taught at both Caltech and Purdue. Professor Goins has published over 20 journal articles in areas such as applied mathematics, graph theory, number theory, and representation theory and on topics such as Diophantine equations, elliptic curves, and African Americans in mathematics. He has acted as a referee for 20 different journals in mathematics, served on dozens of panels for the National Science Foundation, and has given more than 150 invited addresses on his research.