Ten lessons for the survival of a mathematics department
pp. 204-208
in: , Indiscrete thoughts, Berlin, Springer, 1997Abstract
Times are changing: mathematics, once the queen of the sciences and the undisputed recipient of research funds, is now being shoved aside in favor of fields which are (wrongly) presumed to have applications, either because they endow themselves with a catchy terminology, or because they know (better than mathematicians ever did) how to make use of the latest techniques in P.R. The following decalogue was written as a message of warning to a colleague who insisted that all is well and that nothing can happen to us mathematicians as long as we keep proving deep theorems.