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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25377 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Terence Tao: I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.

In just six months, the United States has seen a wholesale assault on the scientific infrastructure that helped make it a world leader in innovation. Grants have been cancelled mid-project, fellowships for the next generation of researchers gutted, and federally funded institutes stripped of the resources they need to operate. These decisions are not the result of scientific review or Congressional debate, but of abrupt political directives that bypass long-standing norms, disrupt multi-year projects, and erode the independence of our research ecosystem.

In that time, I have seen first-hand how sustained federal investment—channeled through agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF)—powers the collaborations that link universities, government laboratories, and industry. At UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where I now serve as Director of Special Projects, those collaborations have laid the groundwork for both theoretical breakthroughs and practical technologies. My own research at IPAM, for instance, helped lead to the algorithms that now cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10. This is the America I chose as my adoptive home: a place where science is valued as a public good, and where researchers from around the world come to contribute their ideas and energy.

It is therefore stunning and devastating to discover that the new administration, in just its first six months, has deliberately attacked and weakened almost all the supporting pillars of this ecosystem. Executive actions have cancelled or suspended federal grants with unprecedented scale and speed, with billions of dollars worth of ongoing research projects and experiments disrupted. This is not because of a negative scientific assessment of the work, but instead by seemingly arbitrary justifications. Critical funding has been pulled for as insignificant a reason as the presence of a key word in the original proposal that is retroactively deemed unacceptable.

Federal support is, of course, a privilege, not a right; and Congress has the constitutional authority to set the budgets and rules for any expenditure of public funds and resources. But many of these executive actions have not waited for either explicit or implicit Congressional approval, and in some cases have even directly ignored past Congressional mandates for appropriations. Relative to the sheer size of the federal government as a whole, the amount allocated for supporting science is not massive. The NSF mathematics and physical sciences (MPS) directorate, for instance, is the largest of the subdivisions of the NSF, and has an annual budget of approximately $1.7 billion. This looks significant until one realizes that it amounts to about five dollars per US citizen per year, and less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget as a whole.

He seems to be referring to how the admin took an axe to science funding by ctrl+F-ing for 'woke' dictionary terms: underrepresented, minority, diverse, etc. The problem is that the effects seem to be about indiscriminate regardless of whether you were a true believer or merely box checking. Will we see upgraded diversity science pledges in the next democrat admin? Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.

This may be low-effort but... why do so many people glaze Terrance Tao...!?

OK, he won a fields medal. Neat. Someone wins one every year.

OK, he won it at a super young age. Neat. There are tons of super-young math prodigies. I went to school with several, they all burned out.

OK, he's published lots of famous math papers. Like... uh... what....? Can you name them? Can you understand them, even a little? Even describe which field of math they were in? (no googling please)

I mean cmon, Einstein was famous too but at least people understood his work a little. Same with Stephen Hawking.

Terry Tao just seems to be a case where the nerd/math world needed a celebreity and they all descended on this one guy for arbitrary reasons.

This is a funny post but

OK, he won a fields medal. Neat. Someone wins one every year.

is literally wrong. «The Fields Medal is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians under 40 years of age at the International Congress of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), a meeting that takes place every four years». So at most one person wins it every year on average. This level of ignorance of the domain suggests you can't really have valuable intuitions about his merit.

From January 31, 2015 The Parable of the Talents

Every so often an overly kind commenter here praises my intelligence and says they feel intellectually inadequate compared to me, that they wish they could be at my level. But at my level, I spend my time feeling intellectually inadequate compared to Scott Aaronson. Scott Aaronson describes feeling “in awe” of Terence Tao and frequently struggling to understand him. Terence Tao – well, I don’t know if he’s religious, but maybe he feels intellectually inadequate compared to God. And God feels intellectually inadequate compared to John von Neumann.

See i see anecdotes like that, and I think "cool, what did he say that's so smart it made a highly respected professor feel awe? Can i see it too? Maybe I can't understand it but Id like to try. "

With Einstein, there's tons of famous quotes from him, and a ton of pop science designed to help regular people understand his work. Because he did interesting work that we want to understand. Scott Aaronson has a nifty blog helping regular people understand his own work in quantum computing. Ive never seen anyone try to do that for Terence Tao. It just seems like hyper abstract academic stuff that only mathematicians would care about.

This may be low-effort but... why do so many people glaze Terrance Tao...!?

Prior to this discussion, I don't think I had heard of him. But I don't work in a STEM field.

There are tons of super-young math prodigies. I went to school with several, they all burned out.

Isn't the point that unlike your classmates, Tao didn't burn out?

There's an understatement. Looking at the most popular semi-objective metric for research output:

Tao's h-index is 116, with his 116 most-cited papers since 1998 having 116+ citations each (the top one is over 20,000), giving him an annualized h-index of 4.3. Hirsch's original suggestion was that a "successful scientist" after 20 years would be around 1 annualized, an "outstanding scientist" around 2, and a "truly unique" one around 3.

IMHO (very H, ironically, because of low h), a high annualized h-index is neither necessarily nor sufficient to say that someone's a good researcher, but it is pretty solid proof that someone didn't just burn out.

Hirsch's original suggestion was that a "successful scientist" after 20 years would be around 1 annualized, an "outstanding scientist" around 2, and a "truly unique" one around 3.

I'm going to venture a wild guess and say this was before Goodhart's Law had it's way with that measure.

There's also the Mathew Effect, where people give credit to the most famous scientist just because it adds prestige. But can sometimes lead to people like Einstein getting solo credit for things he just briefly mentioned.

Surely people are Goodhart'ing it, but either they're not very good at it yet or they're not trying very hard. The first two math department heads I looked up, at a large top-50 research university, were at [edit: approximately] 1.5 (for a relatively young guy, to be fair) and [edit: approximately] 2.5.

It's a metric that's somewhat designed to counter Goodharting of simpler "publication count" metrics. Divide your research up into "Least Publishable Unit" chunks, and you get more papers, but then the people who want to cite you end up only citing the most relevant chunk and killing your citations-per-paper.

[edit: the "Formatting help" link says you need to double up the ~ character on both sides of text to create a strikethrough, and the preview text rendered fine, but in the thread my pair of single tildes turned into a strikethrough...]

Surely people are Goodhart'ing it, but either they're not very good at it yet or they're not trying very hard.

They are, though. The insanely skewed citation distribution is exactly what you'd expect from people figuring the optimal way to game the system. You're not getting anywhere by autistically focusing on your own reaserch, and hoping others will find it interesting enough to cite. You band together, and boost each other up. There's little individual glory in it for most people, which is why it looks like "they're not very good at it yet, or they're not trying very hard", but that's the best way for them to keep a stable job until they get their big break.

You see this on literally every social network, academia is no different, and the original statement about how much citations which kind of scientist will get, implicitly assumes people won't figure out how these systems work.

Just standard winner-take-all dynamics. The number 1 player in any given sport isn't getting most of his sponsorships because of his absolute ability, but because he's number 1. Way easier to just say "the greatest" than "not Pareto superior but widely considered the overall best when measured along certain dimensions". It's less the math world needed a celebrity than the public needs someone to call the "smartest person on Earth" and by default they're gonna pick a mathematician or a theoretical physicist.

But for what it's worth, his blog explanations of math feel well-written and intuitive in the way only someone with a lot of breadth and depth can be.

That's my suspicion. Its like people have taken the prestige from the entire field of mathematics and awarded it all to this one guy, because they need a single person to be the face. No one cares about the number 2, even if he's also super smart and successful.

I learned analysis from his excellent textbook on it. Felt it gave me much more solid intuitions than Rudin, which I was struggling with. (To be fair, I don't glaze Axler, so there's still a gap.)

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