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Industries urged to hire mathematicians to solve complex problems

Biriwa (C/R), Aug. 31, GNA – Professor Armin Fugenschuh, a Professor of Engineering Mathematics and Numeric Optimisation from the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-senftenberg, Germany, has encouraged industries and companies to hire people with strong mathematical knowledge to address their complex and challenging problems.
He said industrial mathematicians had the ability to translate a real-life problem into a mathematical one and then translate the mathematical solutions back into forms that could be applied to the real world.
He noted that most companies struggled and sometimes collapse if they were not able to compete in the market because they did not have mathematicians who would be able to strategise and identify the main issues within a complex problem and formulate an approach to solve them.
« The problems that we face are mathematical problems and they are hard so you need to have certain glasses to see it » he said.
« I will recommend that all the big companies should have departments of mathematics and computer sciences, who will use this kind of method to optimise the day –to- day business of the company and on the other side, make strategic questions on what the market will be in the next 10 to 20 years or how to transform the company to remain competitive for the next 20 years » he added.
Prof. Fugenschuh said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on the side-lines of the opening of a six- day training workshop on Computational Mixed-Integer Programming at Biriwa in the Central Region.
The workshop is being organised within the framework of the German Research Chair programme in AIMS Ghana, under the Alexander von Humboldt and the German Ministry of Education and Research and the DAAD foundation.
It is being attended by 35 renowned international and national scientist, researchers, young researchers and graduate students working on optimisation, computer sciences, statistics and related fields.
With participants drawn from six universities across Africa and Europe, the workshop would provide training in formulating linear, non-linear and mixed-integer optimisation problems, using the modelling language AMPL and solve problems with various problem-class specific numerical solvers.
It would also provide a platform for increasing the collaboration between students and researchers in stochastic analysis and applications on the one hand, and various institutions and research centres on the other hand.
Prof. Fugenschuh said companies needed mathematicians with imagination and mathematical talents to transform their operations to maximise profit, ensure customer satisfaction and ultimately contribute to the management of their risks.
« If a company has more than 100 workers, they should have at least one mathematician among them, who will take care of what they are doing, how they are doing it and find better ways of maximizing profit with less people » he said.
He said it was high time industries appreciated that most of their challenging problems were mathematical in nature and therefore could only be solved using mathematical modules and approaches.
Prof. Fugenschuh recommend to people in industry to open up to academia and from time to time organise workshops to discuss their problems with academia, with the hope of finding solutions to them.