You can do a great deal more as a statistician than actuarial work. I’ve got a mathematics degree, but ended up in fatigue design 4 years ago. Engineers tend to have great intuition about physical things, but tend to struggle a little with the theoretical tools.

Nice summary! And I completely agree, mathematics provide a toolbox for reasoning. A proof about a model is the cheapest way of obtaining knowledge

I think the chasm really is within the statistics discipline, less so between statistics a d mathematics. If you’re doing statistics research you’re essentially a mathematician in the statistics subfield. If you’re applying statistics in another field, you’re a statistician in the professional worker sense.

Most of them won’t do mathematics research. And since realistically it is quite hard to both innovate in mathematics and in an applied field at the same time, the differentiation is valid.

Could also be that he wants elections in Summer, when everyone is on vacation.