Alumni
Jobs Panel
We hosted an industry jobs Q&A panel with recent Pitt math alumni as panelists. These panelists were:
Derek Orr, BNY Mellon
Elise Villella, Google
Manu Jayadharan, Citigroup
Thesath Nanayakkara, Morgan Stanley
Many current grad students attended and benefitted from the experience of the panelists. We learned a lot about what kinds of industry jobs are reasonable for mathematicians, how to prepare for the job application process, and what the work-life balance is like outside of academia. We thank the panelists for their time.
Dr. Elise Villella, PhD
On April 12, Dr. Elise Villella returned (virtually) to campus to give a talk in the Undergraduate Seminar titled Math Puzzles with Python. Dr. Villella graduated from Pitt’s Math Department with a Ph.D. in 2019 and now works in Pittsburgh for Google.
During her talk, Dr. Villella introduced us to Project Euler – a web-based series of challenging math and computer programming problems. These problems are open to anyone who wants to attempt to solve them, and users can track their progress and see how many others have managed to obtain a correct solution for each problem. Dr. Villella walked us through a solution to one of the introductory-level problems, demonstrating how she used Python to generate functions to check for the largest palindrome number that is a product of two 3-digit numbers.
Next, Dr. Villella showed us how to import modules in Python to help in finding the index of the first term in the Fibonacci sequence that contains 1000 digits. This was another problem from Project Euler, and it demonstrated how useful a computer can be in quickly solving problems by brute force.
Dr. Villella concluded her talk by providing the audience with links and suggestions for how they can start solving math puzzles on their own via computer programming. With cloud-based programming and information sharing, we saw that it was possible to be up and running with merely an internet connection and some free time.