About Pi Mathematicians
About Us
Many of you reading this have taken math at some point in your academic career and at the end said, “So?! I can solve for x. Wow. Isn’t that neat?” Or even if you took advanced calculus, you ended up saying, “Whoopee, I can integrate! Nifty!” The most interesting problems are often the dreaded word problems.
Understanding the practical side of math seems insurmountable, especially when word problems often appear as ideal situations that you’ll never encounter. Why ask a mathematician what to do if they’re only going to be able to solve the problem when there’s an ideal situation? Might as well take a wild guess!
Yes, mathematics and mathematicians love ideal situations. We’re trying to solve for every possible situation, not the individual weirdnesses of the world.
Look at it this way: A mathematician defines a thing they call a ‘chicken.’ They define it to have feathers, claws, wings, a beak, and anything else you think fits the definition of chicken. They write lots of theorems and proofs and papers about the chickens. No one outside of mathematics professors understands what’s really going on, but the professors are excited about the chickens and the math they’ve been able to do.
Then applied mathematicians come along. They want to write code, to define algorithms, and to find some way to take these theoretical chickens and predict the future using them. (That’s not all that applied mathematicians do, but stick with me for this!) After much work, thought, more work, programming, and even more work, the applied mathematician comes back and says, “This will work! It’s genius! …but only if the chicken is a sphere!”
But we, the people behind Pi Consultancy, are the ones sitting at the computers and whiteboards saying, “No wait, we have a flock of chickens. They’re adorable and white and lay eggs! How can we predict how many eggs and chickens we’ll have two weeks from now?”
We’re practical mathematicians. We take part of our work from theory and part of it from the applied programming and put it all together to come up with the best solution. We want the best solution for the problem at hand, even if it is predicting how many chickens you’ll have two weeks from now.
