Mathematics is not redundant

Mathematics is important in general and fundamental to AI

without a research-oriented mathematics department the university will lose out on important developments in all STEM areas

I couldn't believe this was real. What a shame

The study of AI would not be possible without the research achievement in pure mathematics. Whoever makes decision must be sacked from the board.

This is a big mistake

The VC and Executive Board at the University of Leicester are clueless, inept, self-important, and ill-informed. They are ruining the University of Leicester and should be held account. The University of Leicester receives millions in taxpayers' money, millions in exorbitant student fees, and millions in private funding which the Executive Board have mismanaged. It is they who should be removed from their job roles!! The Executive Board are an awful but prime example of how not to execute your job role properly - unlike those who have been identified for redundancy! Stop sacrificing the many for the incompetence of the few!

Without pure Maths, engineering, physicist, economists and accounts would not be able to do their jobs.

Absolutely terrifying!

A passage from Morris Kline's "Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times" : Apparently mathematics cannot flourish in either an earthbound or a heavenbound civilization. We shall see that it has been most successful in a free intellectual atmosphere which couples an interest in the problems presented by the physical world with a willingness to think about ideas suggested by these problems in an abstract form that makes no promise of immediate or practical return. Nature is the matrix from which ideas are born. The ideas must then be studied for themselves. Then, paradoxically, anew insight into nature, a richer, broader, more powerful understanding, is achieved, which in turn generates deeper mathematical activities.

Unbelievable.

The British Colleges witness a tradition which is 7-8 centuries old, when a lot of knowledge was accumulated. AI is a new interesting trend, but the applicants for these positions have most of the time hardly any knowledge at all. How nice, to destroy culture, scholarship, intelligence and replace all with pure slogans! We are on the society where to produce counts nothing, it is just important to sell: but what?

There is an excellent Pure Mathematics group at Leicester and the University has a strong tradition of research in that area (with Louis Goodstein, Roy Davies and Geoff Robinson having worked there, among many others). It is hard to imagine how a reputable university can think of abandoning such a important area of research.

This is blindness

Fundamental research does not seek an immediate economic return and, for that, it must be preserved, in fact, thanks to the freedom of not being attached to concrete problems or the zeitgeist, it may deal with topics that reveal in the future to be much more interesting than the state-of-the-art. So many examples of this kind are available in the scientific literature. People without this kind of historical knowledge about science should be banned from making decisions about the university curricula.

This is just unbelievably shortsighted. Have the administrators ever studied history of science?

Pure mathematics and its breakthroughs inform applied mathematics and vice versa. It is very dangerous to simplify reality and to assume that pure mathematics is redundant. Many of the most vibrant research areas are at the crossroads between pure and applied.

Getting rid of Pure Mathematics at the University of Leicester would show that the institution is going backwards and cannot be taken seriously as an Academic institution.

In the third century BC, Apollonius of Perga created the theory of conic sections – a theory that became famous for its beauty and notorious for its uselessness. But then, more than 1500 years on, Johannes Kepler discovered his laws of motion describing the movement of the planets around the sun. Without Apollonius’s theory, Kapler’s laws could not even have been stated, let alone established. And without Kepler’s laws, Nasa’s space probe „Perseverance“ could never have landed on Mars. From a long-term perspective, therefore, Apollonius’s theory has turned out to be of profound practical importance. In view of these developments, and many others of a similar kind, the decision to eliminate research in pure mathematics at Leicester University is a short-sighted one at best, and a disaster in the long run. The VC of the university is strongly urged to revoke her or his decision as soon as possible.

Research in these fields is inextricably linked to research in pure mathematics. Removing Mathematics can only make the others weaker.

This is very short sighted of the administration to stop research in pure mathematics, its simply unbelievable that somebody could think something like this.