To some extent, industrial engineering is a form of applied mathematics, or at least many applied mathematicians find careers in industrial engineering.
Industrial engineering covers a wide variety of occupational skills and knowledge.
Many of the problems people work on involve a variety of mathematical topics, such as calculus, linear algebra, discrete mathematics, and computer science. Not all of them require backgrounds in the sciences, and for some, a background in economics is useful. To see the variety of areas covered, check the areas of expertise of the industrial engineering faculty at Purdue . Some of the computer science specialties include expert systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics, computer graphics, discrete event simulations, queueing networks, production and inventory control, and scheduling algorithms. One of our alumni, Jeff Anderson, a mathematics major, class of 1992, is an industrial engineer at Commonwealth Aluminum in Kentucky.