alt Hacker NewsThere's an old joke about funding, goes something like:
"Why you are always demanding more funding? Why can't you be more like the mathematicians, all they need is a desk, some paper, and a pencil, and a garbage can, and they just do fine. Or how about philosophy, for that matter? They don't even need the garbage can"
I mean, obviously with modern computational mathematics, this doesn't hold so simply, but there is this confound about math research also not getting much funding also because much of it isn't that expensive, relatively speaking.
Last I knew, at least in America, universities that want their math prof's to do research also expect those prof's to bring in plenty of outside funding. You could argue about the costs of that desk, paper, pencil, and such - but modern "research" universities have evolved into extremely high-overhead operations, and The Beast Must Be Fed.