Math Professor Works to Keep Students Off "The Street"

For years, Chris Wiggins has observed a common trend in the post-Columbia career paths of his top math students: They join Wall Street banks. "They're resigned to becoming quants," says Wiggins, 39, a professor of applied mathematics at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science . "They don't know about other options." Chris Wiggins, professor of applied math, hopes more of his students look beyond Wall Street for career options and consider job opportunities in New York's nascent tech start-up space. If Wiggins had his way, more of his students would join New York City's burgeoning tech start-up scene. The payoffs, he says, would be huge: The influx of new talent would expand the city's technology sector, the brain drain of math and engineering students to West Coast schools and companies would ebb, and New York City's intellectual environment would be enriched. "I want young people to realize the creative things they can do with math," he says. To broaden his students' career options, Wiggins teamed up with Huffington Post website co-founder Jonah Peretti two years ago to organize a series of on-campus meet-ups between Internet developers and Columbia's math community in which the scientists present real-world quantitative problems, and Columbians help solve them.