Comment by Dylan16807
9 hours ago
Yes you have to allow people to pursue these things. That's not a compelling argument for funding, especially when nobody was funding the people that did invent calculus.
9 hours ago
Yes you have to allow people to pursue these things. That's not a compelling argument for funding, especially when nobody was funding the people that did invent calculus.
> nobody was funding the people that did invent calculus.
Of course someone was. Newton and Leibniz weren't living in autarky an some island. They had an income stream that was taken away from somewhere else and given to them so that they could afford working on their pet projects.
The fact that it's not publicly funded doesn't change the fact that there's still resource allocation happening.
I think by that definition every mathematician in the current day is funded, mission accomplished.
> every mathematician in the current day is funded,
This is tautological, “mathematician” being defined in the modern world as someone paid to do mathematics…
Notice that the modern world is able able to sustain significantly more mathematicians than when “mathematicians” used to mean “someone well-off enough to work on mathematics in their ample amount of free time without worrying about their subsistence”.
They worked other jobs, no? No one paid them specifically to invent calculus or anything of the sort.
> They worked other jobs, no?
This is an anachronism, you're projecting modern social organization to an era that worked very differently.