The fate of combinatorics at Strathclyde

Gowers's Weblog 2019-08-20

I have just received an email from Sergey Kitaev, one of the three combinatorialists at Strathclyde. As in many universities, they belong not to the mathematics department but to the computer science department. Kitaev informs me that the administrators of that department, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that the future of the department is best served by axing discrete mathematics. I won’t write a long post about this, but instead refer you to a post by Peter Cameron that says everything I would want to say about the decision, and does so extremely cogently. I recommend that you read it if this kind of decision worries you.