(Google) trends of Mathematics

Posted on April 30, 2007
Filed Under Informatics, World |

The Financial Times published a nice comments about James Simons (available here for free). Sixty year old, Mr Simons is a mathematician who is “the most successful hedge fund manager ever.”

His hedge fund group (Renaissance Technology) has a name which already explaines the cultural origin of the “legions of brilliant people” who work there. Not only mathematicians and physicists, but also linguistics, philosophers and so on. Most probably, Renaissance hires economists and informatics scientists also.

What the article does not say is: where do these people come from? Working at Dubai Bank, I saw that Indian people had high profile jobs - same level as the European people. The broker we had to work with was a former Indian theoretical physicist. Databases were managed by two Indian guys, still in their thirties, with whom was a pleasure to work with. One of them, when I asked where he did come from, said “Bangalore, the IT capital!”

Indian universities are (I must suppose) extremely good. In addition to that, comparing them with the Italian ones, have a huge advantage: they teach in English. But what is becoming clear, it is that the culture of the “developing” countries is much more “renaissance” than the Italian culture - today. All that is explained, as usual, thanks to some Google product.

I just began using Google Trends to see if people visiting my site using certain keywords could read the article in the language I wrote it. For instance, the article “Storia della matematica” (History of Mathematics) is in Italian. But most people searching google for matematica come from:

1. Angola
2. Mozambique
3. Venezuela
4. Romania
5. Dominican Republic
6. Guatemala
7. Peru
8. Bolivia
9. Portugal
10. El Salvador

All “developing” countries. Italy is not even in the first ten. Italian is the fourth language after Romanian, Moldavian and Portuguese.

Even more surprising the analysis of the keyword mathematics. No “developed” countries in the first ten (Jamaica is the first?! I could not imagine that most of the people looking for information about mathematics are Jamaican.) After Jamaica, only African and South East countries. Looking the cities, there are only South East places, with the exception of Cambridge, MA, USA.

The success of people coming from South East in finance is not only due to the “cheap” workforce (an Italian mathematician would not ask a bigger salary than an Indian one - a university researcher, in Italy, earns €1,200 per month!). It is due to the fact that in these countries people are actually more close renaissance (and Renaissance Technology, then) than we are.

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