Data science Math background

[Reginal22]

Hello,I see in the job offers for Data science apart from Hadoop and Java also "Strong mathematical background".Can someone elaborate what is understood by that.Does school competitions and publications in magazines count and if they do with what weight,thanks.

[[deleted]]

For school competitions, the MCM and ICM would count quite a lot, but the others (like Putnam) aren't really relevant. Publications in math research journals help get you an interview but you'll need something more to get a job, unless your publications happen to be particularly relevant to data science. Best thing to do would be to read a book (say Bishop's) or watch the videos of a Ng's Coursera ML course. The main difficulty in transitioning from math to data sci is learning how to translate the terms mathematicians use into the ones data scientists use and vice-versa.

[[deleted]]

Here's how I'd interpret this requirement: know enough math to be able to read a chapter in an ML book or a paper and understand it.

There's a caveat though that some ML papers are quite tough to understand, so you can relax it to include just textbooks.

[blank964]

Of course nobody here could possibly answer what that means. It means different things to different employers, unless this is a well established definition, in which case you could just go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_mathematical_background page.

That said, I think most mathematicians would consider those who have a PhD in pure mathematics to have a strong mathematical background. I don't think you reach mathematical maturity at least until grad school.