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The National Science Foundation (or other group) should produce high-quality video lectures for all courses.

• j2kun 11y ago
  If this caught on all mathematics departments would lose funding and no longer be able to fund research. It's a strange conflict of interests.
  • Natsu 11y ago
    I would hope there would be funding from somewhere, at least at the state/federal level. Mathematical research has proven very important to a number of advances in the sciences, even research that was once thought to have no practical use.
    • j2kun 11y ago
      I think a pretty overwhelming majority of math research funding comes from the fact that math departments are service departments for engineering, physics, etc. The NSF spends a total of just under 250 million per year on math research. The DoD and DoE also have around 100 million each. Some mathematicians estimate [1] about 30k mathematicians in the US, which at a conservative salary of 50k per year (!) is already 1.5 billion. In other words, either gov't agencies would have to roughly triple their funding (just for math), or about a third of mathematicians would lose their jobs. These are, of course, very rough estimates. [1]: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/5485/how-many-mathematicians-are-there http://mathoverflow.net/questions/5485/how-many-mathematicia...
      • Natsu 11y ago
        I think you meant two thirds would lose their jobs :) And yes, I don't know where the funding would come from if math education was commoditized, as perhaps it should be.