A PhD in math does, however, require a motivated and interested supervisor. A supervisor who can tach you how to write papers, how to get them published, to tell you where you are wasting your time and to help you over the humps that may otherwise stop you. It needs a supervisor who can introduce you to others in the field, even if they live in other countries or on other continents!
That may exist as a culture in Open Source, but does not exist in Mathematics without universities - and I don't know how you make it exist for research that is hard (impossible?) to commercialise.
To do solid research requires a lot of time. Even if you don't need any expensive facilities, you still need a home and to eat, etc. If the government decided to fund maths PhDs directly, they'd need a ready-made corpus of people who could decide who gets funding. They'd need people who have published and who have proved that they know what they're talking about. These people would likely gather in central organisations where they could supervise their charges and collaborate on further publications to prove their bona fides. They may even teach lower level courses to bring in some extra money and share their administrative costs with similar worthies in other subjects...
You can rail against the cost, the prestige, and the lack of faculty positions all you like. Until your proposed solution is more than "do it at home and put it on the internet!", nothing will change.
> If the government decided to fund maths PhDs directly, they'd need a ready-made corpus of people who could decide who gets funding. They'd need people who have published and who have proved that they know what they're talking about.
Government research grants already fund maths PhDs and this process (a corpus of people who decide who gets funding) is how NSF, DARPA, IARPA, etc hand out grant money.
One problem is that the university takes a 60% cut off the the top of government grant awards. What for? I dunno, many places, the football team, padding the endowment, building new B-school buildings, hiring an army of mid-level administrators. It certainly isn't to pay for researcher (professor and postdoc) salaries, they are paid from other grants, again, from the government. It isn't to help with the grant award process, professors (and their students) write all their own grants.
The Academic tradition is alive, but the University has become a bloated beast siphoning life from the researchers and the government. What was a support infrastructure has a life of its own. It needs to be stopped.
>What for? I dunno, many places, the football team, padding the endowment, building new B-school buildings, hiring an army of mid-level administrators.
Are there really schools where the B-school is a net cost center rather than profit center? I thought it was more standard for the business school to be subsidizing other parts of the university.
That may exist as a culture in Open Source, but does not exist in Mathematics without universities - and I don't know how you make it exist for research that is hard (impossible?) to commercialise.
To do solid research requires a lot of time. Even if you don't need any expensive facilities, you still need a home and to eat, etc. If the government decided to fund maths PhDs directly, they'd need a ready-made corpus of people who could decide who gets funding. They'd need people who have published and who have proved that they know what they're talking about. These people would likely gather in central organisations where they could supervise their charges and collaborate on further publications to prove their bona fides. They may even teach lower level courses to bring in some extra money and share their administrative costs with similar worthies in other subjects...
You can rail against the cost, the prestige, and the lack of faculty positions all you like. Until your proposed solution is more than "do it at home and put it on the internet!", nothing will change.