[danielayoub]

Data mining algorithms. Remember, they're the world's largest employer of mathematicians.

[gwern]

'were', I think, may be more operative. I first heard that statistic about a long time ago, more like the '70s. Mathematicians don't seem to be very useful to the NSA's current hacker paradigm. (Note what we haven't gotten from the Snowden leaks so far: any sort of major mathematical or theoretical advance. Amazing hacking infrastructure, though.)

[Estragon]

Given Snowden's stated values, it's highly unlikely that he would report such a breakthrough.

[sumitviii]

Data interpretation is NLP, not maths.

[scott_karana]

NLP is implemented with logical and statistical modelling. How is it a realm of anything but math? ;)

Edit: if you meant that data interpretation is NP, I agree.

[crazypyro]

NLP's foundation is in statistics, so calling it "not maths" seems rather short-sighted. Mathematics, especially statistics, play a crucial role in all data interpretation when you get to any kind of scale and they seem to be the biggest of them all.....