Trump’s America is telling smart people they are not welcome here.
Being one of the world’s greatest mathematicians didn’t protect Tao from losing his National Science Foundation grant in late July, when the Trump administration froze about half a billion dollars in federal research funding after accusing UCLA of mishandling antisemitism and bias on campus.
A court order restored National Science Foundation grants, including Tao’s. But no new awards can be made, putting at risk the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where he is director of special projects. Tao works in esoteric realms, which can lead to tangible real world benefits. For example, some of his work at IPAM has helped make MRI scans faster.
Q: A lot of people that I’ve been speaking to, researchers in different fields, have said that they’ll be okay because they’re more senior. But they’ve expressed a lot of concern about early career researchers and scientists.
A: The NSF grant that I had, I mean its primary purpose was to support my graduate students, give them the opportunity to travel to a conference, which is really important for career development at that stage, to buy them out of teaching for one quarter so that they can work on research. And, you know, at that career level, having a paycheck for $3,000 really makes a difference.
Q: You didn’t grow up in the United States. Why did you choose to build your career here?
A: I myself had no strong desire to leave Australia, and I was also 16 at the time — I wasn’t really thinking about geopolitics or anything. … The adviser I ended up studying under at Princeton was actually the one who wrote one of the most influential textbooks for me as an undergraduate. I distinctly remember the experience of going into Princeton’s math department the first time and looking at the list of professors and recognizing the names of people I’d read about in books.
The U.S. has always had a strong scientific reputation, at least in my lifetime. It’s just the sheer scale of activity and just the general support for science, until recently very bipartisan — an understanding that science brings prosperity, it helps national security. And it’s just a public good. There’s a very positive culture here. People are really sort of ambitious and big thinking and collaborative, and they want to build something that lasts.
Q: If you’ve spent the past few weeks fundraising rather than doing research, what would you normally have been doing?
A: The thing I’m most interested in right now is finding ways to use all these new modern computer technologies. AI most famously, but there are other things called formal proof assistants and collaborative platforms like GitHub … to try to reinvent the way we do mathematics.
Mathematicians, traditionally, we work alone or in small groups of like three or four people. We work with pen and paper quite often. … Compared to the other sciences, we’re still very old school … I’m hoping to organize some experimental projects where we take a big math problem, we break it up into little pieces and then we try to crowdsource some pieces. And maybe some pieces we leave to professionals, and then try to use all this modern software to coordinate and check all the contributions — and do “big math” the way that other sciences have begun to do “big science.” We have no analogue of the human genome project or the Higgs boson experiment. We are still stuck in the early 20th century or earlier.
Q: A lot of what’s happened at institutions over the last seven months, not just UCLA, is slowdowns and uncertainty and then sometimes reversals so that the effects are often somewhat temporary. If things do go back to normal, why does the uncertainty make a difference?
A: Because so much of it just was planning and budgeting and also just mental. In order to do the best science, you also need to have a somewhat tranquil mental state. Just to give it an analogy, suppose it’s a little bit chilly. It’s 60 degrees in your home, and so you set your heater to 72. But suppose that your thermostat suddenly changes the temperature to 100 degrees and then to 40 degrees and finally it’s back to 72 degrees. On paper, you now have the right temperature, but you’re not feeling too good after this. And somehow you can’t relax and sort of be productive, especially if you are worried that it’s going to do that again. A lot of what the federal government [has done in the past] is actually just providing stability and predictability. This has always been a great strength of the U.S.
Q: Do you have a sense of optimism or would you ever consider leaving the U.S.?
A: I’ve had a very positive experience at the U.S. for 30 odd years … It offers so many things that are definitely not perfect, but you feel like things can happen here, really good things.
Now there’s uncertainty and, you know, 12 months ago, [if] you asked me, am I going to leave it? It was not on my radar at all. Now, I would very much like to stay and for things to get back to something resembling normal. What’s hardest to restore is the sense of predictability and stability.
People who support all the positive aspects of America have to speak out and fight for them now. The things that you took for granted, there was bipartisan support to keep certain things in the U.S. running as they have been more or less for the past 70 years because the system worked. That’s not a safe assumption anymore.
Musk hired Jeff Thornburg, a veteran aerospace engineer, to lead engine development. Earlier in his career, Thornburg had worked on a US government project called the Integrated Powerhead Demonstrator, where NASA and US Air Force engineers worked with contractors to build and demonstrate the hardware for a full-flow, staged combustion rocket engine. In 2012, when SpaceX began building its own version of that engine, Thornburg and his engineers drove to a government warehouse in the California desert and brought back a truck filled with leftover experimental equipment from the project.
SpaceX still had plenty of work to do: Taking any technology demo and making it reliable enough for operations requires extensive testing and tuning. Raptor, as the company calls its engine, uses a different kind of fuel than the IPD project, which meant new designs and experiments. In 2019, SpaceX became the first organization in the world to fly this type of engine.
When Starship and its Super Heavy booster took flight on Oct. 13, it was a testament to SpaceX’s expertise — but also to the American system of public-private innovation that is currently facing its biggest stress test in years.
“Raptor wouldn’t look the way it does without the IPD program,” Thornburg says. “Not only did IPD pave the way for a lot of things that are happening with Raptor and other engines, the same process happened to make SpaceX successful with Falcon 9 and Merlin.”
Governments don’t just provide funding and create demand for tech companies; they also supply research and development elbow grease. Akhil Rao, a former NASA economist who co-founded research and advisory firm Rational Futures, points out that government nondefense R&D at agencies like NASA, NIH and the Department of Energy is estimated to account for about a fifth of post-World War II business-sector productivity growth in the US. Policies that overlook those contributions may leave the founders of the next American tech startup without seed corn to plant.