Imagine canceling Albert Einstein right before he discovered E equals MC squared. That's exactly what happened to UCLA's Terrence Tao, the so called Mozart of mathematics when the Trump administration abruptly axed his research funding. The official story came from political fallout related to alleged anti Semitism at ucla. The real story, hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost for pure science. Today I'm walking and talking with Professor Terence Tao himself in part one of a special two part series with this famed and decorated mathematician. Today we'll unpack how the world's most famous mathematic went from solving equations to battling bureaucracy and why the future of American research depends on what happens next. Stay tuned and make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss part two of our special sit down conversation with Terrence Tao. Coming soon.

So Terry, you wrote this very interesting and powerful blog post recently about the situation on campus funding that was cut not only for you, but for many members of the UCLA community. Can you give us the story on that?

Yeah. So it's been a very chaotic six months. In general, I think we've been accustomed to a very stable and predictable environment here in the United States where we rely a lot on federal funding to do our research to support our next generation of researchers. But a lot of rules have changed. It almost seems like the making of the rules as they go along. Now funding that was approved has been suspended or canceled. New grants are definitely being cut. There are more hurdles now to get foreign visitors to visit or immigrate to the US but here at UCLA there was a unirado cut to all NSF and NIH funding was suspended a few months ago, including my own personal grant, for instance, but also the math institute that I'm involved in, iPam, we use this grant to run our operations.

And we are set to run several major programs where we have many researchers from different fields come and talk to each other and we had to scramble to find emergency funding because suddenly the grant that we were using and which had just been renewed was suspended without any notice and not for any scientific reason. I mean, so it was said that the entire university was not compliant with something else and they were just collectively basically imposing penalties on, on the entire, on all the activities here. So I mean, cuts are not unprecedented. In the past we've had budget cuts to the NSF and other funding agencies, but we get, usually there's like a year or so of notice and we work with the agencies to sort of structure the funding so that you can get the most science out of the least disruption. But this round is very different. I mean, there's really no consultation and there's no effort to try to do the least harm possible.

Do you feel like it was like intentionally targeting you specifically? I know your colleague Judea Pearl here. I don't know him personally, but I know he was also obviously quite involved in the Jewish community at ucla. And we should note for the listeners that might not be familiar, in 2024 there was a large encampment here as there was at UCSD here. It lasted significantly longer. As I understand it. That was sort of the rationale for suspension of funding for miscompliance with Title 6. And what do you make of that? Do you think it was an excuse? You've been critical of Trump, I think for a while. But what do you make of the.

Is it a pretext?

I don't pretend to understand their motive, thinking it doesn't seem targeted to any specific person. I think they're just making changing the rules as they see fit. And in many cases there isn't a semblance of a long term plan. So yeah, I mean, there are other cases where grants have been cancelled just because there was a keyword. For example, many math projects involve inequalities and we've had grant proposals cancelled because the word inequality is suddenly not a good word to use in a grant proposal. I mean, so there's often not any discernible reasoning behind this. There may be impossible decisions that have not really been thought out. I mean, again, this is another change with previous administrations.

Normally there's a process. If you want to adjust the budget of an agency, you may go through Congress and maybe you get the budget office to do some projections. And these are just decisions that are made very quickly with no public input, not even congressional input in many ways. And so you have all these collateral. So there's a lot of collateral damage, which maybe I don't know if it's intentional or maybe they just don't care, but they're not following sort of the standard due process that we've been accustomed to.