We often tell our students that there are many things besides teaching and actuarial work that they can do with a degree in mathematics, but I don't think they believe us. Over the years, I've put together a list of well-known people who were math majors (or some equivalent in other countries and times), although not all of them completed their degrees. It's the most popular thing I've ever had on my office door. When I began this list, it had mostly comtemporary Americans, and I called it "People who majored in math." Some of my students added their own names to their copies and posted them on their dorm doors.

I'd be delighted to hear of any additional names.

THE PUBLIC REALM

Ralph Abernathy, civil rights leader and Martin Luther King's closest aide.

Corazon Aquino, former President of the Philippines. She was a math minor.

Harry Blackmun, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, AB summa cum laude in mathematics at Harvard.

David Dinkins, Mayor of New York, BA in mathematics from Howard.

Alberto Fujimori, President of Peru, MS in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Ira Glasser, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, both a BS and an MA.

Lee Hsien Loong, Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore, a Bachelor's from Cambridge.

Florence Nightingale, pioneer in professional nursing. She was the first person in the English-speaking world to apply statistics to public health. She was also a pioneer in the graphic representation of statistics; the pie-chart was her invention, for example. Not really a math major, she was privately educated, but pursued mathematics far beyond contemporary standards for wormen.

Paul Painleve, President of France in the early 20th century, and one of the first passengers of the Wright Brothers. A ringer: he had a distinguished mathematical career.

Carl T. Rowan, columnist for the Washington Post.

Laurence H. Tribe, Professor at Harvard Law School, often regarded as one of the great contemporary authorities on Constitutional Law. An AB summa cum laude in mathematics from Harvard.

Leon Trotsky, revolutionary. He began to study Pure mathematics at Odessa in 1897, but imprisonment and exile in Siberia seem to have ended his mathematical efforts.

Eamon de Valera, long-time Prime Minister and then President of the Republic of Ireland. A ringer: he was a mathematics professor before Irish independence.

MUSIC

Ernst Ansermet, founder and conductor of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.

Pierre Boulez, Modernist composer and conductor.

Clifford Brown , Fifties jazz trumpeter.

Art Garfunkel, folk-rock singer. MA in mathematics from Columbia in 1967. Worked on a PhD at Columbia, but chose to pursue his musical career instead.

Phillip Glass , composer, a Bachelor's from the University of Chicago.

Carole King , Sixties songwriter, and later a singer-songwriter. She dropped out after one year of college to pursue her music career.

Tom Lehrer , songwriter-parodist. PhD student in mathematics at Harvard.

Lawrence Leighton Smith , conductor and pianist.

THE OTHER ARTS

Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass , and other works. A ringer: he was a logician under his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Heloise (Ponce Cruse Evans), of Hints from Heloise . She minored in math.

Larry Niven , science fiction writer, winner of the Nebula and Hugo awards.

Omar Khayyam , author of The Rubaiyat. Another ringer: he published works on algebra and Euclid.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn , Nobel prize-winning novelist, a degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Rostov.

Bram Stoker , author of Dracula, took honors at Trinity University, Dublin.

Christopher Wren , the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

FINANCE

John Maynard Keynes , the great economist. MA and 12th Wrangler, Cambridge University.

J. Pierpont Morgan , the banking, steel, and railroad magnate. Some of the Gottigen faculty tried to convince him to become a professional mathematician.

Ed Thorpe , one of the inventors of program-trading on Wall Street.

PHILOSOPHERS

Edmund Husserl, the "Father of Phenomenology," PhD in1883 from Vienna.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy. Studied mathematical logic with Bertrand Russell.

ATHLETES AND OTHER COMPETITORS

Michael Jordan, basketball superstar. He changed to another major in his junior year.

Davey Johnson, manager of the 1986 New York Mets.

Emanuel Lasker, world chess champion from 1894-1921. Another ringer, he was a mathematics professor with several published papers.

David Robinson, basketball star. BS in mathematics from Annapolis.

Frank Ryan, star quarterback from the Cleveland Browns in the sixties. PhD from Rice.

Virginia Wade, Wimbledon champion, BS in mathematics and physics from Sussex.

LITERARY CRIMINALS

James Moriarty, former Professor of Mathematics, author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, whose essay on the binomial theorem is said to have had a continental vogue, became the leader of the most sinister criminal conspiracy in Victorian England. He has been called "the Napoleon of Crime." Sherlock Holmes's nemesis.

CRIMINALS

Ted Kaczinski, PhD in mathematics from University of Michigan. Kaczinski worked at UC Berkeley for some time and published papers in complex variables before retreating to the woods and becoming the infamous "unabomber."