Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Terry Tao: “Trump CUT My Funding.” Here's how I am going to react.

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

What happens when a government abruptly cuts off the lifeline of pure science? Imagine canceling Albert Einstein just before he published [E = mc². Terence Tao, the “Mozart of Mathematics,” was one of the unlucky researchers hit when the Trump administration suddenly terminated his federal research funding. Today, I walk and talk with Tao at UCLA to understand how America’s greatest living mathematician found himself blindsided by a bureaucratic earthquake — and what it means for the future of discovery. This is Part 1 of our deep dive into Tao’s work, his warnings about the collapse of U.S. research infrastructure, and why mathematics is the unseen root system supporting all of modern technology. 🕒 TIMESTAMPS 00:00 – *“Canceling Einstein”* — Tao’s funding cut 00:22 – Who is Terence Tao? 01:17 – Grants suspended without warning 01:27 – New hurdles for international scholars 01:38 – UCLA’s sudden funding freeze 03:00 – Was Tao targeted? 03:38 – Arbitrary rule-changing 04:01 – Trivial reasons for cancellations 04:18 – Policy without process 05:06 – Do we need new funding models? 05:27 – Why federal stability matters 05:52 – The limits of philanthropy 08:42 – Math as the root of modern tech 09:11 – Prizes and public perception 11:35 – The seven great unsolved problems 12:13 – The Navier–Stokes question 12:57 – The problem with prize-driven secrecy 13:37 – Collaboration over competition If you care about ideas, discovery, and the future of knowledge itself — this conversation matters. Part 2 drops soon. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Get My NEW Book: Focus Like a Nobel Prize Winner: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FN8DH6SX?ref_=pe_93986420_775043100 Join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/yt to win a meteorite 💥 - Join this channel to get access to perks like monthly Office Hours: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join 📚 Get a copy of my books: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner, with life changing interviews with 9 Nobel Prizewinners: https://a.co/d/03ezQFu My tell-all cosmic memoir Losing the Nobel Prize: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA The first-ever audiobook from Galileo: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican https://a.co/d/iZPi9Un 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 Neil Turok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt5cFLN65fI Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Eric Weinstein vs. Stephen Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/g00ilS6tBvs Avi Loeb: https://youtu.be/N9lUceHsLRw Follow me to ask questions of my guests: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast #universe #podcast #briankeating #intotheimpossible #science #astronomy #cosmology #cosmicmicrowavebackground #intotheimpossible #briankeating #terrencetao Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's exactly what happened to UCLA's Terence Town, the so-called Mozart of Mathematics, when the Trump administration abruptly acts as 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 Town 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 mathematician went from solving equations to battling bureaucracy and why the future of American research depends on what happens next. Stay tuned to 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, predictable environment here in the United States where we rely a lot on federal funding to do our research, just for the 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's been, there are more hotels now to get foreign visitors, to visit or immigrate to the U.S. But here at UCLA, yeah, there was a unilateral cut to all NSF and NIH funding was suspended a few months ago, including my own personal grant, for instance,

but also there's the Massachusetts 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, which had just been renewed, was suspended without any notice. And not for any scientific reason. I mean, so they said that the entire university was not compliant with something else. And they were just, you know, collectively, basically imposing penalties on, on, on, on, on.

on the entire, on all the activities here. No, 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, you know, usually there's like a year or so of notice, and we work with the agencies to sort of structure the fundings so you can get the most science out of the least, but 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 hard possible. Do you feel like it was intentionally targeting you specifically? I know your colleague Judea Pearl here. I don't know personally, but I know he was also obviously quite involved in the Jewish community of UCLA. And we should note for the listeners that might not be familiar. In 2024, there was a large encampment here.

So there was at UCSD. Here it lasted significantly longer. As I understand it, that was sort of the... the rationale for suspension of funding from miscompliance with Title VI. 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 you don't think, what do you make of the, is it a pretext?

I don't pretend to understand the motor thinking. It doesn't seem targeted to any specific person. I think they're just making, changing the roles as they see fit. And in many cases, there isn't a semblance of a lot of a lot. long-term plan. So, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, there are other cases where grants have been canceled just because there was a key word, you know, for example, many math projects involve inequalities, yeah, and we've had grant proposals canceled 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, you know, if you're or to adjust the budget of an agency. You may go to Congress and maybe you get the budget office to do some projections. And these are just decisions that are made, you know, 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 it's, I don't know if it's intentional,

or maybe they just don't care, but they're not following sort of a standard due process if we've been accustomed to. When we think about the models of funding, we take for granted now that the federal government supports math and physics, but that wasn't always the case. In fact, Al-Leo was supported by patrons. The Simons Foundation supports a tremendous amount of math, research, autism, physics, et cetera.

Do you think that we need a new model? This model has been around since the 1940s with the Banavre Bush's, The Endless Frontier. Do you think that there is an argument to be made by people people that say, well, why should Terence Tao is doing foundational work in mathematics? Why should most of his grant money go, not to him, but to the university fringe benefits, IDC, which then can maybe support things that aren't related to the mathematics that you're trying to break ground with? Right. So mathematics is the way sciences in general, they're part of a broad ecosystem.

So you do have these high-profile researchers. And I personally, you know, I could possibly get my own funding and private sources. Where federal funding really makes an impact is in sort of providing the broader, long-term, stable environment where you can get students to get attracted to common working science and have some guarantee of predictable ability to pick up funding and have some ability to do research before they've made the big name and before they can attract their own funding. I mean, we have in the past, you know, we have this great ecosystem where we have the federal funding as the base. Yes. And then there is this industry and philanthropy, which can provide more targeted and flexible funding for specific projects. I think it's only the federal government has to scale and the long-term commitments. You know, if you rely on a patron or an individual philanthropy, you know,

maybe they'll fund you for a year or two, but there was no real predictability that it would last, you know, you'd always have to keep renewing it. Now, the same is true for the funding agencies, but there at least there was a very well-established process. And, you know, we've had decades of, you know, we had practices which have been honed over the years. And we kind of know what they want. They know what we can offer. And it's worked very well until the last year, when somehow a lot of the institution practices and norms, much of what's going on now is not

consistent with any past policy of the NSA of NSF or yeah so you need some ability to do long-term planning because like many research projects you need to hire postdocs say for three years or

or graduate students for four years and you know it's a big commitment to have to move to a different state say and have people set up so you need funding that is predictable over that kind of time scale and if every year year, you're fundraising for just your this year's budget. You can't do that. Right. It's very unstable.

And a long-term, really sustainable is a big, big keyword. As you said, these projects take many years, decades sometimes to go to fruition. You know, look, you're studying prime, you know, twin pairs of primes. Come on, they don't have any relevance to the real world. Why should, you know, a auto worker in Ohio, you know, why should he or she pay taxes to support something that's, you know, literally pie in the sky? What do you say to be full? that that don't appreciate and have the love and passion that we do for basic, you know, fundamental blue sky research. Yeah.

So, I mean, every technology pretty much that people use these days, if you look under the hood, there was some basic mathematical advance that powered it, you know, the fact that cell phones just work, even when there's many cell phones in the same location, you know, there's no interference, there's a lot of mathematics that goes into making that work. The fact that you can have a teleconference with somebody across the country and, you you know, the signal is pretty good. There's a lot of image compression. There's a lot of mathematics that goes into that.

You know, as we talked before, the fact that cryptography just works is because we know enough of our prime numbers that cryptographers don't choose bad algorithms that are easily defeated by certain features of prime numbers. You know, it's not visible. Math is at the very beginning of the pipeline. It's like the roots of a tree. The tree, yeah.

Yeah. Right. But if you take away the roots, eventually the whole tree would die. That's a beautiful way to put it. Okay, so curious about the nature of prizes. Obviously, you couldn't have predicted you would win the Fields Medal. It's harder to win than the Nobel Prize, right? It's only offered every five years.

You have to be under 40. Yeah. Was it a motivating factor? The thing about prizes, it doesn't help you prove the theorems in any faster. Yes. The prizes definitely this mixed bag. So on the one hand, yeah, I mean, personally, they help the career of the Christmas wins of prizes. Yeah. Amazingly. They also, you know, I mean, they're good PR because people just naturally,

I mean, science and mathematics in particular, so abstract. If you just present the math, it doesn't, people don't connect with it. If they see a person, you know, then there's more of a connection. But it is also, it also presents a misleading picture of how math works. Like, it gives a sense that there's only a few people who can do math and then everybody else who don't sing other prizes, they can't do math at all. And it's, it doesn't. like a at all. So it does, I think, I mean, what does hope is actually the mid-tier of prizes, where, especially for junior career, broader prizes, rather than the big sort of singular, you know, the best mathematician in the world type prizes. Those, I think, are less useful.

But there's a public sort of demand for something like this. Yeah, the hero worship and the great man, woman of history. Yeah. What about the millennium problems and the prizes? What's the status of them. You're famously involved in Navier-Stokes version of it. But maybe you could recap for my audience. Not familiar with it. What were the Millennium Problems? What are they? What's the foundations? Did you add to it? So yeah. So this is one example of philanthropic funding of mathematics. So the Clay Foundation in 2000 announced seven one-million-dollar-priced problems, selected to be sort of representative of... We're being set upon by AI. Oh, yes, I'd love a latte. It's good. It's good. gone off the ramp, I think. So you think that AI has no, math has no uses that's doing right

there. Perfect. Get a picture of that, I guess. So, yeah, sorry, before we were interrupted by our mechanical overlay. Millennium Prize is established by the Clay Foundation in 2000. Yeah. So they established, so they identified seven problems in seven different areas of mathematics, which were kind of representative of really big goals. And all is it extremely, extremely difficult. And so, yeah, it perceived a big splash. Or each of the seven is a really important problem. I wouldn't say that they're the seven most important problems, but they're very representative.

So they became somewhat well-known. And so you could explain PDs as the field which contained, for example, the Navassox regularity pot, which is the problem I'm most familiar with, which is basically it's the question of whether water can spontaneously explode. from smooth initial conditions, which we never observe it to happen. Right. But in theory, the equations could actually have a solution that does that. So, yeah, they have been very motivating.

There is this funny effect, though, that if all these problems is very far from being solved, then having a big, famous, prominent problem, encourages people to work towards the goal and publish partial results. But I guess if you get, the topic is getting really close to being solved, and you just need one or two more papers to get there. People start becoming secretive, and they don't share their ideas. That's exactly what you don't want. Yeah, prizes are generally productive until they become sort of too much of the focus.

What would you add if you could add a Millennium Prize? And not just one that you've already solved and you're keeping in your drawer upstairs. That's a good question. I'm increasingly inclined to think about broad problems rather than singular. problems. I've been sort of gravitating towards challenges where instead of trying to solve one problem, I make some list of a thousand or a million problems and I just try to say, okay, who can what tools can solve the greatest percentage of this broad class of problems?

I think, so first of all, this is the type of mathematics, which I think modern technology like AI can really make an impact on. I think it's less exclusive. You can be less competitive. I mean, you can still compete in your. I can sell 26%. You can still 25%. But it's so cumulative.

And like everyone can contribute a piece. Whereas one of the problems of these prizes is that is that it's all or nothing at some point. Right. I mean, you either get the prize or you don't. And I feel like that that is, that can be unhealthy. All right. Well, Terence Tao, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. And it's been such a pleasure getting to meet you and spend the day with you.

Thank you so much. for having us here. Yeah, no, that was great. So there you have it. Terrence Town's solution to the pressing problems of politics and mathematics. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss part two where he sat down for over two hours with Terrence in his office talking about his research, artificial

intelligent math professors, and whether mathematics is created or discovered. Watch this video with UCLA PhD Sam Harris, who also is no fan of Donald Trump and believes that Donald Trump is killing scientific research in America. Click here and don't forget to subscribe.

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