It is refreshing to find an article with a false title that contains it's own refutation within the first five paragraphs:
"The only career in which a high school graduate can expect to continue to work on [problems with a unique correct answer] is academic research in pure mathematics"
Unfortunately for this article, the premise that mathematics is the same thing as engineering is false.
If an engineering problem does not have a unique solution, its because of complications introduced by the real world. Any engineering problem which can be well-posed as a pure math problem, does of course have a unique solution; as the author concedes.
It depends on what you mean by a math problem. It seems a common idea is: A math problem is a question asking for the set of solutions to some mathematical equation, and only the actual solution is useful.
But I would include all of the following as math problems:
-Prove that some equation actually has solutions
-Find some bounds on solutions to that equation
-How can I compute an approximate solution to that equation?
-How good is that approximation going to be?
-What's a way to try to separate large data sets into clusters?
With regards to the first four: many equations people are interested in simply have no hope of getting a solution you can write down. Simple example: sqrt(2). A more complicated example: solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations.
"The only career in which a high school graduate can expect to continue to work on [problems with a unique correct answer] is academic research in pure mathematics"
Unfortunately for this article, the premise that mathematics is the same thing as engineering is false.
If an engineering problem does not have a unique solution, its because of complications introduced by the real world. Any engineering problem which can be well-posed as a pure math problem, does of course have a unique solution; as the author concedes.