The Innumerate Scientist of the 21^st Century -- a Contradiction in Terms. (April 12, 2006)

    The University of New England, in northern NSW, has handed redundancy notices to three of its top mathematicians.

Imre Bokor, Gary Bunting and Beatrice Bleile were told last week their services were no longer required.  Those three constituted 43% of the university's mathematics staff.

On March 23 the journal Nature published a series of articles under the grouping 2020 Vision: how computing will change the face of science.

Titles included:

2020 computing: Champing at the bits.
    Despite some remaining hurdles, the mind-bending and frankly weird world of quantum computers is surprisingly close.

2020 computing: Everything, everywhere.
    Tiny computers that constantly monitor ecosystems, buildings and even human bodies could turn science on its head.

2020 Computing: Exceeding human limits.
        Scientists are turning to automated processes and technologies in a bid to cope with ever higher volumes of data. But automation offers so much more to the future of science than just data handling.

2020 Computing: The creativity machine.
        What will emerge from using the Internet as a research tool?

2020 Computing: Science in an exponential world.
        The amount of scientific data is doubling every year.

2020 Computing: Can computers help to explain biology?
        The road leading from computer formalisms to explaining biological function will be difficult but... three hopeful paths... could take us closer to this goal.

2020 Computing: A two-way street to science's future.
        To view the relationship between computing and science as a one-way street is mostly untrue today.

In the tail piece for this group, 2020 Computing: A two-way street to science's future, Ian Foster, Head of the Distributed Systems Lab, Mathematics & Computer Science, Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois is blunt:

Ian Foster, Head of the Distributed Systems Lab, Mathematics & Computer Science, Argonne National Laboratory.

...the data deluge and system-level science demand computing technology in all its forms — hardware, software, algorithms and theory. The growing importance of computing has several implications for the science of 2020.

 

First, the scientists of 2020 will be adept in computing: not only will they know how to program, but they will have a solid grounding in, for example, the principles and techniques by which information is managed; the possibilities and limitations of numerical simulation; and the concepts and tools by which large software systems are constructed, tested and evolved.

    The idea that you can be a competent scientist without such training will soon seem as odd as the notion that you need not have a solid grounding in seventeenth-century mathematics (such as algebra).

 

Second, successful science collaborations of 2020 will include computer scientists as key members. All scientists will be adept at applying existing computational techniques, but they will also understand that progress in their fields will require innovation in computing technology.

 

Third, the scientific disciplines and institutions of 2020 will need to train, attract and reward researchers whose focus is on producing the computing innovations required for science to advance: what we might term 'applied computing'.

    Academic departments are hiring faculty with strong computational inclinations.

 

The growing importance of applied computing also has implications for computer science. Indeed, just as during the early days of the sciences, scientific concerns drove mathematics forward (think of the origins of the calculus), so the many challenging problems posed by modern science can help to focus and motivate research in computing. In my view, it is no accident that some of the most vibrant areas in computing today are those tightly coupled to scientific problems.

Well, perhaps all of this are just the outpourings of a bunch of self-interested, self-serving  geeks. Certainly, the approach of Australia's federal and state governments leave that impression.

For example the Federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop, ballyhoos the Australian School Innovation in Science, Technology and Mathematics (ASISTM) initiative which is at best a bandaid when an extreme makeover is required; that is, if science, technology, engineering and mathematics are really required to foster the wellbeing of the nation in the 21^st century.