Return on investment for a society’s spending on math professors
I listened to a COVID-safe Zoom talk from an MIT math professor. He talked primarily about a geometric optimization problem. My question:
Maybe this will be covered during the talk, but being an engineer I would like to hear what the practical applications could be if Larry solves all of the problems that he’s talked about and/or others that he’s working on. Would ChatGPT get smarter? Would Elon Musk get to Mars sooner? Would renewable energy become cheaper?
He responded that he’d never worked on any problem that he thought had a practical application, but that maybe tools developed to solve a seemingly pointless optimization problem might end up being used to solve a practical problem. He added the question was “Above [his] pay grade.”
What about the graduates? “Half of my Ph.D. students go into academia and the other half go into finance,” responded the professor. “I think it might be because the finance industry has a well-developed path for bringing in people with quantitative skills and no other knowledge.” (i.e., half the students decided that numbers were more interesting if prefixed by a dollar sign)
There are supposedly about 35,000 math professors nationwide. Maybe 10,000 are paid primarily to do research? Taxpayer-investors will need to have nerves of steel to keep paying these folks! (Figure about $350,000
I wonder if we can date the last innovation from the math researchers that is used in ChatGPT. The guys who are credited with developing “deep learning” don’t have math Ph.Ds. (Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton) The speaker on Zoom event said that, as far as he knew, all of the math being used in LLMs was “old”.
Separately, the Boston Globe reports that there is a narrow majority of haters within the MIT faculty:
At MIT, about 20 students, according to student organizers and professors, have been placed on interim suspension, which means they can no longer access campus buildings, participate in graduation, receive wages for student jobs, or finish their final exams and projects. Most have also been told they need to vacate their university housing. MIT declined to confirm the number of students suspended.
A handful of the suspended students were expecting to graduate this semester, and now their diplomas, post-graduation jobs, research projects, and internships hang in limbo, according to interviews with more than half a dozen students and MIT professors. The MIT encampment ended on May 10 when police cleared out the demonstration in the early-morning hours; 10 students were arrested.
Hannah Didehbani, a senior at MIT studying physics who was suspended, said she does not know when she will receive her degree, and that the university has provided little detail about how she should proceed.
“MIT is only taking these unjust, repressive actions such as suspending us, arresting us, evicting us because they are afraid of the power we have,” Didehbani said.
A majority of the MIT faculty appear to be in favor of disciplining the student protesters, however. At a faculty meeting Friday, a motion to remove punitive actions from the suspensions lost, said philosophy professor Sally Haslanger. About 190 faculty opposed removing disciplinary actions, while roughly 150 favored the idea.
Related:
- official Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion web site for the MIT math department: Members of our community come from a variety of racial, ethnic, indigenous, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. We are LGBTQIA+. We are women and men and non-binary. We have families and pets. We are veterans. We are immigrants. We possess a range of physical abilities. We are first-generation students. We are young and we are experienced. We are MIT Math. [Mindy the Crippler makes our household diverse, according to the geniuses at MIT, due to her Canine-American and Scottish-American background (golden retrievers hail from Scotland).]
- Out of the 74 gender IDs recognized by Science, just one is highlighted:
