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 they often don't believe us. Here is 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.

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

• Corazon Aquino, former President of the Philippines. She was a math minor at the College of Mt. St. Vincent.

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

• Simeon DeWitt, was the first math major at Rutgers. He became General George Washington's Chief Geographer in the Revolutionary War. His maps of Yorktown helped win the final battle of that war. Afterwards (1784-1834) he was the Surveyor General for New York State; he helped to plan the Erie Canal, and to develop the grid system of streets and avenues in New York City, among other things.

• 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.

• William J. Perry, Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry holds a bachelors and masters degree in mathematics as well as a PhD from Penn State. His thesis advisor at Stanford was the famous mathematician George Polya.

• Carl T. Rowan, columnist for the Washington Post received a mathematics degree from Oberlin College.

• 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.

• George Saitoti , current vice-president of Kenya has a Ph.D. in Algebraic Topology from Warwick University.

• 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.

• 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.

• Inaba Koshi, a famous Japanese singer. He is the member of an rock'n roll band called "B'z" with Matsumoto Takahiro, the guitarist. Koshi was a student of Yokohama National University, and majored in mathematics.

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

• Lawrence Leighton Smith, conductor and pianist.

• 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.

• Helene Foellinger, majored in mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champange. Foellinger was also the first woman elected to the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame.

• Teri Hatcher, Lois Lane on "Lois and Clark", was a mathematics and engineering major at DeAnza Junior College.

• 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.

• Danica McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years (TV show). She graduated summa cum laude from UCLA in 1998 with a departmental honors degree in mathematics. Her research project was entitled "Percolation and Gibbs-states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models in two dimensions."

• 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.

• Paul Vanhoeven, director of many hollywood movies (Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Robocop I, etc...) received a PhD in math and physics from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He never used his degree, opting instead to invest his energies in a career in film.
• Larry Gonick, cartoonist, received an MA in mathematics from Harvard in 1969.  

• 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.

• Kai Krause, one of the geniuses of the computer graphics world, helped launch the MetaCreations company. The developer, designer, and digital artist has been selected by both Newsweek and Time as one of the most influential experts of the digital era. In addition, Krause won a Clio award for work on "Star Trek - The Movie."

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Dan Monson, basketball coach at the University of Minnesota.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 ünabomber."

• Margaret Ella Richter, majored in math, computer science and German at the University of California at Berkeley, graduating in three years. She is famous for being a member of the Heaven's Gate cult which committed mass suicide in 1997.

1. Nearly all of this information comes from an article by Steven G. Buyske in the American Mathematical Monthly, v. 100.