How many graduate students in mathematics are there worldwide?

There is already a question about the number of research mathematicians here, but I was wondering :

is it possible to estimate the number of graduate students in mathematics worldwide in 2019 ? (Note that, especially since not all of GS stay in academia, it is quite different from the other question.)

Ideally, what I'm looking for is a graph since 1950, with a break-up by country.

For the US, such a graph can be found on a fine page by the AMS up to 2015-16 data (published in march 2018), although crucially it doesn't mention the yearly number of drop-outs.

So the main aim of my question is to find the equivalent for other countries.

• I think I found some data for France : this link fr.statista.com/statistiques/618628/… says that in 2017 there were 2,406 doctoral students in mathematics & their interactions. I'm especially curious about China and India though. – Butini May 12 at 18:58

1 Answer

I estimated the amount of graduate math students and especially the amount of math students in general from a theoretical point of view in an analogeous way like the Fermi-Problem.

• There are about $$8\times10^9$$ people living right now.
• About $$\frac{1}{5}$$ of the people are aged between 18 and 28, let's call them young adults.
• About $$\frac{1}{10}$$ of young adults is studying.
• About $$\frac{1}{50}$$ of students study math.
• About $$\frac{1}{5}$$ of math students is studying at graduate level.

This gives $$3.2\times10^6$$ people who study math and thus $$640,000$$ graduate math students.

• this seems accurate for a developed country (for France, with a population of 67 million, your estimate would be some 5000 graduate math students, within a factor of two of the correct answer), but I would think it vastly overestimates undeveloped parts of the world. – Carlo Beenakker Jun 21 at 20:57
• Care to give us some error bars on these estimates, Proxava? – Gerry Myerson Jun 22 at 0:39