For the record, there are lots of other places where you do numerical work. Any kind of genomics work, for one, will involve tons of data processing and numerics, and it's it's not strictly an academic pursuit.

At my previous job most of my day-to-day work was on algorithms for speech recognition and topic modeling, which is pretty well doubles flying left and right. That wasn't academia either.

Thanks. I've actually done some machine learning work both in industry and academia, so I'm both aware (and excited about) doing numerical stuff in industry.

I've yet to actually meet someone in industry who does numerical work that isn't some form of data analysis. Maybe someday...

You hit the nail on the head with academia. Physics, to be precise. About 80% of my code is data analysis stuff where I'm just reducing events from data files. The other 20% is monte carlo simulations.