Rick McQueen Assignment 5

This may feel choppy and prosaically malnourished because it is a condensed version of a 2-3 page first draft.

If academia wants funding and respect it must produce degrees and research that improve our economy and quality of life. Too often the defenders of university forget that schools  - certain academic fields especially - are increasingly failing to live up to the unspoken assumptions underlying our support of education with public money. In math especially, we have a choice of how much basic and applied research we choose to conduct. The defenders of basic research always point out that sometimes those results will develop applications decades later. I'm not entirely closed to this argument, but I've also never seen it sufficiently fleshed out. Yes, Boolean algebra ended up underpinning one of the most revolutionary technologies of all time, but Boolean algebra is not very complicated and I think it could easily have been invented later, closer to when it was needed. Additionally, other people have to do non-trivial work to translate pure results into technology, such as using circuits for Boolean operations, or even realizing that Boolean algebra could underpin a then-theoretical general computing machine.

I understand the aesthetic of basic research, but I don't know that I can justify its worth to society as anything over than an art form for which only a few develop a taste. It may be the case, for instance, that certain areas of basic research have a much higher chance than others of being useful later on, or that applied researchers are perfectly capable of inventing the results they need and that a stockpile of already existing pure math results doesn't save much time.

There is a "general cognitive strength" argument for the study of very abstract fields. Philosophy majors score highest on the LSAT. I have read on professionals' forums for finance and programming that each field sees only about a quarter of its best come from its own departments, with most coming from math and physics. If such anecdata could be expressed in a more rigid way, and causality could be shown, it might persuade governments that we are useful.

I wish K-12 math had less Algorithms Handed Down From God and more proofs, logic puzzles, etc. We waste a lot of time in high school learning things that most people never use, and to boot give rise to a narrow and inaccurate perception of what math is.

I don't think public opinions related to math and/or education have much of a trickle up effect towards government. Frankly this probably makes our job easier.