Math Forum / Mathematics / Undergraduate Math / October 2008

As I rant and rave, continually antagonize my audience, and talk about
cutting public funding for basic research, or well, any research at
all, I can imagine mathematicians smiling to themselves.  No way
people will ever listen to such nuttiness and they may smugly feel
they can rest secure that I'll never be taken seriously--except I DO
have major mathematical research results.

So their satisfaction in my mind is a dismissal of their own field.

These modern "mathematicians" clearly despise mathematics.

As if, as if a really unlikable guy could possibly get listened to
<gasp> just because he has mega mathematical discoveries of the type
that come around once in a century, or more.  No way, right?  Not in
our popularity dominated world!

Don't you know the lesson of MTV?  Of The HIlls?

Popularity is all that matters, right?  Substance means nothing,
right?

And if you believe them you can sit back and relax, but if they're
wrong then you know that an increasingly angry and frustrated major
discoverer is figuring out ways to convince policymakers someday that
sharp reduction in public funding for basic research is the ONLY way
to bring back integrity to the system and insure that people are
actually doing real research of some value.  People doing valuable
research will find a way.  The cons will leave for easy money
elsewhere.

And besides, I figured out my mathematical results without public
funding and with mathematicians from around the world mostly making
fun of me, the nasty bastards.

IF I can do it, others can.

So what good are you academics anyway?

Professors teach.  Discoverers do.

Albert Einstein of course worked in a patent office.  What if society
missed the clue?  The reality that maybe academia INHIBITS major
discovery.

What if we got it wrong?  What if our universities around the world
while playing a crucial role of teaching are the last places to go to
for innovation?

What if our world has created a massive system for BLOCKING major
advances, where now even the would-be Einsteins of today cannot get
past the professors of today?

The message I'm giving to you if you haven't picked it up, if you are
an academic, is that you are probably a failure at your job, but
surrounded by other failures, you all call each other successes, and
condemn the human race to the muddled mess you call research.

Publish or perish.  Yeah, you publish, and let the human race perish
for people who are second-rate researchers at best and outright frauds
in many cases in a system that does not work.

And my story proves that beyond a doubt.  You block major mathematical
discoveries because you are incompetent boobs living off the public in
a white collar welfare system and you legitimately see me as a threat
to your free money.

Yeah, you con artists.  I am a threat to your free money.  And you are
a threat to human civilization itself.

You are the snakes in the grass.

James Harris