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Comment by rambojazz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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