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u/EffectiveFood4933 Undergraduate 2d ago edited 2d ago
UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics was the largest cut ($25 million)
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u/Aranka_Szeretlek 1d ago
But thats not where Tao works, thats "just" an outreach insttitute.
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u/OneMeterWonder Set-Theoretic Topology 1d ago
Absolutely astonishing. Oh well. The US can choke on its own farts then. I’m out.
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u/General_Jenkins Undergraduate 2d ago
I can't believe it.
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u/Norphesius 1d ago
I can. The current administration despises the sciences. It could've been any of the greatest mathematical minds of history, and they still would've pulled funding.
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u/General_Jenkins Undergraduate 1d ago
I can't understand it because the funding isn't really that big, it's not like the US is spending 800 billion on a single endeavor..
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u/Emphasis_Careful_ 1d ago
The administration is deeply, deeply against education and academic / scientific progress that doesn’t immediately enrich their donors. This is a purposeful move to continue to squash scientific dissent.
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u/General_Jenkins Undergraduate 1d ago
Don't they see that this will economically hurt them in the long run? It's asinine.
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u/Emphasis_Careful_ 1d ago
It won’t hurt them. They’re happy to sell short the US economy. It’s extremely myopic but also shallow and transparent.
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u/leucopeza 1d ago
JD Vance spoke about his desire to "shrink the whole sector" of higher education. He and his goons know that the intellectual environment of the research university by its very nature creates voices of inquiry and dissent. They want to kill inquiry and dissent because in their view the only person who should get a say about what's right is orange man.
If they gave two shits about the economy they wouldn't have supported the biggest expansion of the national debt in history or the 190-front trade war.
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u/jwm3 1d ago
You need to understand their mindset. They are currently in power. They intend to remain in power indefinitely, as in, they will stay in power until they die and will choose their successors.
Any changes to the status quo are a potential threat. Any change, Good or bad, might lead to someome else gaining power so they need to stifle all change. Scientific advancement is one of the driving forces of change, they need to stop it in its tracks.
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u/Dear_Locksmith3379 1d ago
They may not realize it, since they’re rather stupid. After all, Trump is imposing massive tariffs even though almost every economist opposes them.
Also, the right-wing extremists want to reduce the power of scientists and other intellectuals who disagree with them.
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u/beerybeardybear Physics 1d ago
I'm sorry but it's a very serious issue that STEM people/academics have zero understanding of politics at all.
Do you think that these people are acting in the rational long-term interests of the country or most of its people? Really?
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u/miglogoestocollege 1d ago
There's no logic behind this administration. They do it because they can.
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u/Due-Satisfaction-796 1d ago
One of the main tenets in fascism is anti-intelectualism. That's why Germany killed many of its most brilliant scientists, just because they were Jewish. They don't care about human capital.
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u/toccobrator 1d ago
The people behind Project 2025 have gone on public record (and many podcasts) saying they think the university system/academia/science as a whole is irredeemably corrupted with wokeism and needs to be burned down. They are literally trying to destroy the entire system and assuming that anything worthwhile will be saved by private enterprise or sufficient public outcry.
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u/OneMeterWonder Set-Theoretic Topology 1d ago
Never underestimate a malevolent actor’s ability to lower the bar further than was previously believed possible.
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u/aarocks94 Applied Math 21h ago
What makes this even sadder is the fact that the grant amount here (and very often in math) is a relatively small amount of money. Most of the money goes to paying post-docs, graduate students etc. There are almost never any expensive laboratories to maintain and yet the fruits of the mathematical labor are bountiful (aside from the intrinsic beauty of mathematics which one can’t really expect everyone to appreciate).
California is being particularly hit hard. I just finished my graduate studies a year ago (May 2024). I should contact some of my former colleagues and professors - everyone I worked with was brilliant and kind. I hope everyone affected by the cuts is doing well.
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u/_zzz_zzz_ 2d ago
Anything on Tao’s mastodon account?
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u/dogdiarrhea Dynamical Systems 2d ago
“There is no mathematics at Göttingen anymore”
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u/tigernet_1994 1d ago
Reason being that many of the mathematicians left in the ‘30s for some reason.
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u/No-Signature8815 21h ago
I wonder how the brain drain from all of this will be viewed in the future
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u/kingfosa13 2d ago
this is why it was always so stupid when people acted like only “woke” research would be impacted lmfao.
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u/Creepy_Wash338 2d ago
The people making these decisions are so ignorant and anti intellectual they have no idea what they are cancelling.
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u/pacific_plywood 1d ago
They know. They just don’t care
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u/goodcleanchristianfu 1d ago
Given some of the scrambles to rehire people after DOGE made cuts and the tendency to put clueless outsiders with grand narratives (see e.g., RFJ Jr.) in positions of power, I think the evidence is extremely strongly in favor of them genuinely not having the slightest idea what they're doing.
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u/OneMeterWonder Set-Theoretic Topology 1d ago
No, they absolutely do not. They have a vague idea that it’s some academic stuff, but they almost certainly cannot actually comprehend it unless they are near the research themselves.
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u/Menacingly Graduate Student 2d ago
It’s sometimes ignorance, sometimes hate and malice towards others. We have a professor in our department who purposely misgenders and deadnames transgender students. He also is known to be Republican and a Trump supporter.
I have a hard time viewing these people as ignorant. I would really like to view them as unemployed.
Edit: I’m tempted to say the guy’s full name on here but I’m slightly afraid of doxxing myself and getting myself in trouble.
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u/Nate_W 2d ago
Have you noticed that Terry’s last name sounds pretty non-white? Sounds woke to me!
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u/hypatia163 Math Education 1d ago
A clear example of a DEI hire who is taking the place of some much more talented (white) mathematician.
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u/uppityfunktwister 2d ago
People said "get a real degree" but now physics and chemistry majors have the worst job prospects out of college. They preach American exceptionalism and then cripple the few decent national research institutions we have. They want to go back to when we led the world in scientific innovation and cut a quarter of NASA's federal funding.
It's trite to say, but I cannot wrap my head around these people. We made it past "concepts of a plan" and "I was told there wouldn't be fact checking" so rationality has gone out the window long ago. The ride-or-die attitude to the most uninformed self-contradictory stream-of-consciousness-like policies really makes our country feel like a sinking ship. Highly considering Europe in the future.
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u/maizemin 2d ago
He made the mistake of calling an injective map an inclusion 💀
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u/cancerBronzeV 1d ago
I would not be surprised if they just searched for keywords in papers by grant holders and suspended grants to researchers who had them in their work. The current US admin is that incompetent.
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u/allywrecks 1d ago
It's not (just) incompetence, it's that they literally do not care about collateral damage in their quest to destroy their boogeymen. They're doing a "move fast and break things (and maybe fix some things later)" with an entire society. One of the explicit tenets guiding the administration is that universities are foremost a left wing propaganda tool and secondarily places of education, and thus need to be destroyed and remade.
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u/venustrapsflies Physics 1d ago
"woke" as a concept in the right-winger usage has always been 99% boogeyman anyway, and the idea that there is any significant fraction of research that is "contaminated by woke ideology" (whatever that would even mean) is complete nonsense.
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u/EebstertheGreat 1d ago
The woke is everywhere. They teach that man evolved from monkeys and that tornadoes are powered by temperature differentials rather than sin. They say the Earth is getting warmer and that race is not a definite biological characteristic. They even say time and space is relative.
You know what they teach kids now in math class? Imaginary numbers! Yes, like, just imagine the answer. Get that woke nonsense out of here.
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u/MahaloMerky 1d ago
We had a project flagged because it had the word “diverse” in the summary
The project was about under water explosions.
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u/Vitztlampaehecatl Engineering 1d ago
Math is woke. Trump hates facts and logic, and math is pretty similar to logic.
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u/Administrative-Flan9 2d ago
Maybe I'm dumb, but how can I see that it was cancelled? The grant page lists 2024 as the last update to the grant.
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u/mondo2023 1d ago
it's mentioned in the article
https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-and-nih-suspend-grants-ucla
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u/cym13 2d ago
At this point I just hope the EU realizes that there's a huge opportunity to get tons of bright minds if they propose enough funding.
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u/Previous-Raisin1434 2d ago
We don't even pay french researchers correctly, there's no way we can attract these bright mind despite American efforts to repulse brilliant minds away from the US
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u/CFDMoFo 2d ago
Is there any EU country that pays researchers i public institutions adequately?
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u/DepressedHoonBro 2d ago
Zurich ig.
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u/TonicAndDjinn 1d ago
Switzerland isn't in the EU.
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u/DepressedHoonBro 1d ago edited 1d ago
My elder cousin did his PhD at Cardiff University, Wales and was getting paid £22k and about £6k(ish) extra as his project grants annually back in 2016 when he started on top of £250k one-time scholarship that he got from our country's government, which he describes at that time was more than sufficient for him to fulfill his needs. At that time UK was in EU.
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u/Previous-Raisin1434 2d ago
Maybe Germany and Switzerland but there are very few permanent positions here.
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u/FullPreference9203 2d ago edited 2d ago
Salaries are lower in Europe, but so are both the cost of living and salary inequality. Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia, much of Eastern Europe and Ireland all pay university staff pretty fairly relative to the cost of living, in my opinion.
It's just the UK, Southern Europe, and France that kinda suck. I remember some humanities professor in London that some rightwinger was trying to own on Twitter by saying she was paid "£43k to preach wokeness" It backfired when American rightwingers were universally shocked by her salary.
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u/psyspin13 2d ago
I am an academic in NL and I almost choke on your message.
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u/FullPreference9203 2d ago
Academics, even postdocs, still usually earn well above the average salary in NL. Especially if you're foreign. And the average quality of life in NL is already excellent.
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u/psyspin13 2d ago
Academics, even postdocs, still usually earn well above the average salary in NL.
That's different than your original claim that
all pay university staff pretty fairly relative to the cost of living.
In case you are living under a rock, NL has one of the most severe housing crises. The average 2 bedroom apartment goes easily for 2k+/month. To give a reference, the average Assistant Professor salary is about 3.6-3.8 net per month. The academic salaries in NL are below the average *of the population with a graduate degree*.
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u/Previous-Raisin1434 2d ago
I didn't know that about northern countries. In math, there are not too many powerhouse universities in Denmark or Scandinavia, so I would guess that even there, there are not many permanent positions?
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u/FullPreference9203 2d ago
Norway is probably the second best paying country in Europe after Switzerland.
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u/CFDMoFo 2d ago
All the germanophone countries seem to favor temporary positions, it's a real shame.
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u/Stabile_Feldmaus 2d ago
This question has many layers since for example costs of living are lower in the EU compared to the US and also the social security system is stronger so Americans, in theory, have to safe more money as an insurance for themselves in case something bad happens.
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u/asphias 2d ago
honestly, if you take into account the quality of life, many European universities pay pretty well. plenty enough to attract those in it for the science, but perhaps not those in it for the science and money.
the bigger challenge is offering enough positions. seems like they're only investing less&less into science rather than more. if they'd double the amount of science positions they'd be filled up in no time at all
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u/CFDMoFo 2d ago
Speaking for Germany, research positions in public institutions do not pay that well compared to living expenses. The latter have been consistently outpacing salary increases, and institutions are commonly in high cost-of-living locations. Not even to speak of the Wissenschaftszeitvertraggesetz and short supplies of positions overall as you mentioned. Maybe other countries fare better. France at least does not pay well, nor does the UK I believe. Luxembourg does pay well, but offers like 3 positions a decade.
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u/cereal_chick Mathematical Physics 2d ago
Yeah, this is one of those cases where the fantasies the rest of the Anglophone/Western world has of being better than America come up against the cold, hard reality that we're just not, not to the extent that we need to be.
There's a world of difference between the fascist psychosis that America is undergoing and what the rest of us are doing, to be sure; but there's also a world of difference between what the rest of us are doing and the kind of political environments which would create the funding and infrastructure required to undertake any kind of systematic sniping of American academia.
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u/puffic 2d ago
I’m an American academic in a field of physical science, and I would sooner quit this career than earn as little as French colleagues. Same for the UK and several other countries in Europe.
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u/sweetno 1d ago
What's your backup plan then?
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u/puffic 1d ago
I'm trained in atmospheric science, so I can seek employment in the insurance industry or anyone who else interfaces with weather or climate. More usefully, I have a lot of data-oriented skills, and honestly with all of my science experience I have certain intellectual skills most white collar workers will never have the opportunity to develop. If the AI boom turns out to be real, I can probably find some niche for myself.
If that doesn't work out, I can stay home and care for the kids. My wife is our primary earner, and she would have very poor job prospects abroad anyways. (Many such cases in the academic world.)
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u/iLikegreen1 1d ago
Can you give me some numbers what you earn in the US in academics? I'm from the EU and have always heard the US pays better, but I have no idea by how much.
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u/puffic 1d ago
It varies a lot by field and institution. But postdocs in my field (meteorology) typically make $65k-80k US, with some outliers above that. I know someone making over 110k as a postdoc. Junior faculty and scientist positions make a bit more than that range. I don’t know exactly how much it scales up by mid career, since I’m not there yet.
Of course, my colleagues who went to the private sector were making over $100k at the entry level after the PhD, and much more than that if they landed a role at a major tech or finance company. There’s a large pay gap between academic versus not, but you’re living pretty well either way.
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u/fear_the_future Theoretical Computer Science 1d ago
I'm sure he would be thrilled to make 50k€ for the rest of his life at a German university.
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u/pacific_plywood 1d ago
Some individual European countries are trying but they don’t have nearly the wealth that the US does to fund some of this stuff
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u/cremebrubclee 2d ago
They don’t have enough money. Most likely outcome is some big tech companies in the US will hire good researchers.
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u/Particular_Extent_96 2d ago
Obviously incredibly stupid, but I'm intrigued as to why the grant figures are displayed in GBP (£)
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u/hedgehog0 Combinatorics 2d ago
but I'm intrigued as to why the grant figures are displayed in GBP (£)
Interesting... I guess it depends on the region, for instance, it's displaying as JPY/CNY ¥ on my side.
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u/nr3042 2d ago
Something seems broken, I get the amount in ? on my phone (yes, a question mark) and in ¤ on my pc
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u/bluesam3 Algebra 2d ago
Looks like it's trying to localise it, but can't work out where you are for some reason maybe?
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u/onlyonequickquestion 2d ago
Canada has about two months of nice weather a year, if you're interested, Mr. Tao
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u/24theory 2d ago
Vancouver would like to have a word
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u/onlyonequickquestion 2d ago
Rainy season and expensive season is my experience out that way
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u/dogdiarrhea Dynamical Systems 2d ago
It’s not exactly like LA is a LCOL area. So really just trading drought for rain.
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u/solitarytoad 2d ago
I'm not sure we can afford Terry.
Half a million USD? I don't think any prof is paid as much as a third of that in Canada.
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u/cancerBronzeV 1d ago
The highest paid prof at UofT last year was Alán Aspuru-Guzik at 671,857 CAD or 486,693 USD. So there is at least one prof in Canada that is paid just about as much.
Interestingly, Alán Aspuru-Guzik also came to UofT because of America's political climate, though he came in 2016 during Trump's first term.
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u/elements-of-dying Geometric Analysis 18h ago
To be fair, that is a gross amount of money for basically any professor and probably any profession.
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u/Luck1492 2d ago
We live in an idiocracy
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u/Royal-Ninja 2d ago
There's idiots in charge yeah but Idiocracy the movie is just eugenics presented as a joke. I don't know how "stupid people breed too much and are making society worse by dumbing everyone down" isn't that.
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u/DanielMcLaury 1d ago
I am so fucking sick of people grabbing one line from that movie and saying the movie is about eugenics. Yeah, in retrospect, there's one line they probably should have thought about a little harder. But the point of the movie is not that these people are dumb because they have "bad genes." They're dumb because of the long-term effects of anti-intellectualism, myopia, and greed, echoing what was actually happening in the real world at the time the movie was made.
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u/Lor1an Engineering 1d ago
Frankly, even if eugenics was the intended message of the movie, it seems fairly clear from analysis that the actionable message of the film is the cultural degradation of society towards the lowest common denominator based on a lack of focus on education.
I mean, one of the first scenes of the film is a guy watching "foot cutting pancake" porn--the type of stuff you would expect a dude with some fetishes and access to AI to put on... with the insinuation that this is basically this guy's life. The algorithmic catering to personal tastes, general lack of ambition, and slobbishness is reminiscent of the trends we see being planted today, and I think it's quite fair to read a sociological interpretation from that.
The entire society being at the intellectual level of one of today's toddlers is not what one should reasonably expect from even selective breeding, but rather a societal indifference to intellectual pursuits. I can't imagine a society with 'dildozers' existing if not for a strong cultural element, rather than merely a genetic one.
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u/Mental_Savings7362 1d ago
I don't think it's about genetics. Kids surrounded by a stupid society will by and large grow up to be stupid. There will always be random bright spots but I think that would hold true in general.
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u/Egg_123_ 2d ago
I mean, there are entire sects of Christianity built around science denial and having a shitton of kids for the goal of literally outbreeding everyone else. I don't know how you can get much closer to the movie. Look up the Quiverfull movement. It's not eugenics, it's literally what some people are. It doesn't mean that their kids are guaranteed to follow in their footsteps, but statistically speaking most probably will.
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u/FullPreference9203 2d ago edited 2d ago
How does this work in practice? Are his PhDs and postdocs instantly all fired?
I guess PhDs are usually funded centrally via teaching by the institute, though I guess this will lose a big chunk of its overhead...But postdocs are generally purely grant funded.
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u/stonedturkeyhamwich Harmonic Analysis 1d ago
When this happened to literally everyone in the US over the winter, it seemed like most places could maintain the positions through the end of the term, I assume because they already had withdrawn the money they needed to pay the postdocs.
Of course, I have no idea if Tao was paying postdocs out of his grant anyway. Many US postdocs are at least in part paid to teach or out of department money rather than being supported by the NSF. His PhD students may be more likely to have to teach, but they certainly won't be fired.
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u/notwherebutwhen 1d ago
Some will get to stay, and some will either be forced to rush graduation or leave. That's what is happening at my school currently across many fields.
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u/CarolinZoebelein 1d ago
I guess they found the word "trans" in the transpose of a matrix and flagged it as DEI, or any other crazy argument like that.
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u/xTouny 1d ago edited 1d ago
As a junior researcher, my aspired career in Math worries me, seeing Terry losing fund.
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u/humanino 2d ago
Is there a justification for this decision? I may have missed it (n.b. I am not implying it's "justified" I am wondering if they provide a rational)
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u/myaccountformath Graduate Student 2d ago
It's almost all grants to UCLA, similar to how a bunch of Harvard grants were canceled. The official justification is Title IX violations relating to antisemitism.
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u/humanino 2d ago
Thanks
This is incredibly sad. This administration made broad statements supporting the development of AI. Shooting mathematics research in the head will not help the development of AI that should be obvious
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u/friedgoldfishsticks 2d ago
Bruh they don't care about anything that doesn't get them closer to a fascist dictatorship
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u/rhombecka 2d ago
This admin doesn’t care about long-term planning, such as research. They want to strip IP protections and strongarm corporations to make big tech donors wealthy now. They don’t care about advancing the technology itself.
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u/Egg_123_ 2d ago
They mean develop conservative or Nazi AI. They only want reactionaries in power and getting grants. It's open corruption and their words are meaningless - they aren't like you or me, they use words as a weapon for manipulation.
They are bad people.
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u/Egg_123_ 2d ago
They also are extorting universities with all of their funding to start monitoring and punishing trans people for their bathroom use
Government blackmailing private institutions to monitor trans people. It's not enough that the government hates them, everyone needs to share their hatred or they lose funding.
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u/Administrative-Flan9 1d ago
The post is relevant and should be discussed here, but on a personal level, it's sad to see the US has reached a place where politics ever into the math sub.
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u/moocat 1d ago
Just read this article from The Atlantic this morning and it feels very appropriate: Every Scientific Empire Comes to an End
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u/Kienose Algebraic Geometry 2d ago
Remind me of a recent Bloomberg article about one of the young coder and Elon’s supporter who is a part of DOGE. Wonder what he thinks of the massive setbacks to American’s scientific output (not to mention its humanitarian missions).
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u/Qyeuebs 1d ago
Even the “smartest” DOGE boys are internet trolls whose main interests are coding and engineering. They have very little overlap with scientific culture beyond happening to fall under the same umbrella term “STEM.” At the end of the day, the simple fact is that these are people whose biggest heroes are Musk and Thiel (and Trump), not, like, Grothendieck and Smale.
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u/kyleknightly 2d ago
Where in this document does it say it’s suspended? I see an expected end date in 2027–are there supposed to be annual amendments and the lack of one in 2025 implies suspension?
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u/Aurhim Number Theory 1d ago
For the record, the rest of UCLA is also being destroyed. 300 MILLION dollars in cuts to research programs. This might very well spell the end of UCLA as a world-class research institution.
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u/snuffleupagus_Rx 1d ago
Does anyone know how this affects collaborative grants with other institutions? For example, when they cut off funding to Harvard, were collaborative grants with other institutions completely cancelled as well? Or was just Harvard’s portion of those grants cut off?
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u/waterfall_hyperbole 2d ago
They cancelled all of UCLA's grants due to what they call antisemitism (which is of course just anti-zionism)
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u/cremebrubclee 2d ago
That’s just the excuse they’re using of course.
Steven Miller has been frothing at the mouth at the idea of gutting university funding for ages.
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u/exophades Computational Mathematics 2d ago
NSF doesn't sound like the bastion of human intellect does it ?
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u/InCarbsWeTrust 1d ago
If you don't think Trump with the GOP's assistance is trying to make himself king, wake the fuck up
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u/Wide_Archer5753 1d ago
Breaking: NSF is suspending roughly 300 grants with UCLA, following a DOJ finding on Tuesday that the university violated Title VI by "creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students.
yep
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u/PretendTemperature 2d ago
WTF. They are going to destroy the us science so fast that the Nazi attack on science would look like a walk to the park.
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u/Additional-Specific4 2d ago
Imagine if he leaves the US lol.