webber@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Webber) (10/26/86)
the following quote from Paul Halmos is forty lines long. i tried to
type real small, but this was the best i could do.
I think we have been given too much money. I don't think
mathematics needs to be supported. I think the phrase is
almost offensive. Mathematics gets along fine, thank you,
without money, and I look back with nostalgia to the good
old days, three or four hundred years ago, when only those
did mathematics who were willing to do it on their own time.
In the fities and sixties, a lot of people went into mathematics
for the wrong reasons, namely that it was glamorous, socially
respectable, and well-paying. The Russians fired off Sputnik,
the country became hysterical, and then NSF came along with
professional, national policies. Anything and everthing was
tried; nothing was too much. We had to bribe people to come
to mathematics classes to make it appear respectable, glamorous,
and well-paying. So we did. One way we did it, for instance,
was to use a completely dishonest pretense - the mission attitude
to mathematics. The way it worked was that I would propose a
certain piece of research, and then if it was judged to be a good
piece of research to do, I would get some money. That's so
dishonest it sickens me. None of it was true! We got paid for
doing research because the country wanted to spend money training
mathematicians to help fight the Russians.
Many young people of that period were brought up with this Golden
Goose attitude and now regard an NSF grant as their perfect right.
Consequently, more and more there tends to be control by the
government of mathematical research. There isn't strong control
yet, and perhaps I'm just building up a straw man to knock down.
But time and effort reporting is a big, bad symptom, and other
symptoms are coming I am sure. Thus, I say that it was on balance
a bad thing. If the NSF had never existed, if the government
had never funded American mathematics, we would have half as many
mathematicians as we now have, and I don't see anything wrong with
that. Mathematics departments would not have as many as eighty-five
and one hundred people in some places. They might have fifteen or
twenty people in them, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
Mathematics got along fine for many thousands of years without
special funding.
from an interview with Paul Halmos that appeared in the College Mathematics
Journal, March 1983 (and was reprinted in: Mathematical People - Profiles
and Interviews, Donald J. Albers and G. L. Alexanderson (eds.), Birkhauser,
1985).
-------------------------------------------- BOB (seismo!topaz!webber)