Uh, let's see: When I was buying math and physics books, it seemed that a lot of them credited the NSF with funding. I gave two examples, Kelley and Luenberge

Uh, let's see: When I was buying math and physics books, it seemed that a lot of them credited the NSF with funding. I gave two examples, Kelley and Luenberger, but there were more. Soooo, there was some NSF pure math funding in the 1950s, to respond to a small point. The funding seemed to be generous since the joke was "While you are up get me a grant.". And from my non-representative sample way back there, it looked like the NSF loved "The analytic-algebraic topology of the locally Euclidean metrization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds." I should have been more clear -- LINPACK is software and IIRC was written at Oak Ridge. So, by then some Federal organization was funding software. So, the Georgetown pair, in about 1973, that wanted funding for speech recognition and was told by the NSF that they didn't fund software was, shall we say, early and later the NSF changed their mind. 1973 was a long time ago. So, with your impressive data, the NSF has evolved! Oh, by the way, the grad and ugrad B-school students I taught did okay: They liked that I got them into matrix theory easily, used duality to prove the two person game theory saddle point result, and made min cost capacitated network flows easy to understand.