John Meyers Assignment 5

I'm not a huge fan of pure math, but as soon as some interesting context is brought in I quickly become very interested. For example, some time ago there was a new rocket whose development was enabled by breakthroughs in math. Rockets are cool and I like hearing about these things even though I'm not particularly interested in looking at the numbers myself. I believe most people are like this, they enjoy hearing about technological progress, but as soon as the math itself starts being discussed their eyes glaze over. For this reason, I think that when trying to get people interested in math, it's important to talk about it from a very general standpoint while keeping the context of what it will affect very close to the conversation.

The government is already spending massive amounts of money on math and science research, it needs no convincing at all. Almost every year, the military budget is expanded with near unanimous bipartisan support. Much of this budget goes to creating new military technologies, which involves a significant amount of math and science research, albeit most of this is probably on military bases rather than university campuses. If the goal is to increase government spending on math and science research specifically on campuses, I'm sure this can be done by finding some link, however tenuous, between the research being done and advancements in military technology.