The South China Morning Post's front page reported, "The Mozart of Mathematics" is at a crossroads, as Terence Tao considers the impact of Donald Trump's funding cuts.
Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Fields Medal winner, believes that the Trump administration's cuts to research funding have caused serious damage to the U.S. research ecosystem, leading to interrupted projects, loss of talent, and institutional operational crises.
Several federal-funded projects were suddenly halted, including one led by Tao. Even though the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA had received approval from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the funding was still arbitrarily frozen.
Scholarships for the next generation of researchers have been significantly reduced, and graduate students and research assistants face the risk of being laid off due to lack of funds. Tao was forced to delay receiving his personal salary to maintain the basic operations of the team.
Research institutions funded by the U.S. federal government, such as IPAM, rely on private fundraising to barely maintain their operations, but the funds can only support until the end of the year. Tao warned that this political intervention is undermining the foundation of the independence of the research system.
Original: www.toutiao.com/article/1841650346954752/
Statement: The article represents the views of the author himself.