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Comment by sn41 | Hacker News Reader

I am a pure math guy who absolutely loves the Canterbury Tales.

The only people who should be axed are the administrative windbags and "bottom-line" scallywags. So clever, aren't they? I am sure they can survive out in their precious "real world" that they are so infatuated with and sneer others about.

(Besides Sir Michael Atiyah, Leicester also had my favourite topologist, Roy O. Davies, who wrote one of the strangest papers I have read, "Measures not approximable or not specifiable by means of balls".)

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I also love the Canterbury Tales and still have the intro memorized thanks to a professor I had in college. That said, if students aren't taking the classes I can't see how the school is going to be hurt by losing the faculty. All kinds of things tie into math, not so much into medieval literature.

(That said, I absolutely agree that administrators should be disposed of first and even if there weren't budget problems.)

Sorry I don't know this Uni in particular, and I agree with your comment. But why is this such a big issue? I mean, a lot of universities do not have a pure-math faculty because they are dedicated to other faculties. I guess it depends on what the Uni wants to be. My Uni didn't have a physics department, or a medical one, or arts, or music... All of these faculties were however available in other Unis.

Getting rid of something you already have is more newsworthy than never having it, which is mundane as you say.

Consider if Marks & Spencer announced it would no longer sell clothes, to focus instead on food, for example.

They want to sack the math department to create a machine learning department. But they still need people to teach the math classes for machine learning etc, and without the math professors they'd need machine learning professors or so who aren't as good at maths.

ML uses almost entirely applied math and stochastics: optimization, numerics and statistics. Besides that, just because they won't have faculty researching pure math, doesn't mean they cannot have applied math guys teaching pure math classes.

Personally as a math graduate, I think it is better that they focus on areas they are good at. I assume the pure math department is not doing much. It is also good for the students who might want to study math and end up at studying at a university that does not do pure math very well.

> I assume the pure math department is not doing much.

Please see my earlier comment. They once had a Fields medalist on their staff. And it was not a one-off coincidence. Leicester has a really good tradition of pure math.

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