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Why Study Mathematics When We Have AI?

Students of the Foundation Programmes Engineering and IT and Economics, Business and Management attended a lecture on Wednesday, March 25, delivered by UJOP alumnus Raman Samusevich, who successfully completed the technical foundation programme at UJOP in 2015. After studying at UJOP, he went on to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Czech Technical University (ČVUT FEL), where he specialised in Cybernetics and Robotics and Open Informatics. He now works at Qminers, a Czech technology company specialising in algorithmic trading on financial markets.

During his talk, he shared not only his professional journey but also his experiences from university. At the outset, he highlighted the central idea of his presentation: mathematics is present in almost every area of our lives. He came to appreciate this fully during his university studies while working on a research project focused on analysing molecules using machine learning models. The aim of the project was to develop a model capable of analysing previously unknown molecules, and the results were ultimately published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Biotechnology. Although the work lay within the fields of biology and chemistry, it relied on the same mathematical principles and statistical methods that he later applied in other disciplines.

According to Samusevich, the ability to recognise patterns in data and interpret them correctly is equally crucial in the world of financial markets. At Qminers, his team develops algorithms that analyse vast quantities of financial market data and make trading decisions based on identified patterns far more quickly than any human could.

The lecture also addressed a question many students ask today: Why continue studying mathematics when artificial intelligence exists? According to the speaker, mathematics and statistics provide the essential foundation for genuinely understanding data and technology. After all, algorithms and AI systems are themselves built upon mathematical principles.

Students were therefore able to see how mathematics and programming are applied beyond the classroom, for example in the analysis of large-scale financial market data. The lecture also demonstrated just how far a journey can lead when it begins in the UJOP foundation programme.