Australian Academy of Science National Committee for Mathematics

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SMH Editorial: "Science Locked in a Spiral"

The "enabling sciences" - the foundations of all scientific discovery and technological advancement - are locked in a despairingly downward spiral in Australia. The building blocks of enhanced living standards and the prospects of life's sustenance itself are under stress because their status has diminished. Mathematics, chemistry and physics (and, through them, engineering) are caught in a supply and demand conundrum.

As the Sydney Morning Herald editorial rightly implies, the government is not thinking wisely, or with an eye to the future, about how it spends its education dollars. Already, foreign companies are shelving plans to invest in Australia, because our universities cannot produce the trained workforce that their investment would require. For example, one reason some US companies are not setting up R&D facilities is that we are not training the mathematical scientists they need.

In the real world, the process that connects education and employment works like this: a nation invests in higher education, and then, confident that the system is working effectively, employers invest in high-return activities that utilise a well-trained workforce. In the federal government's world, however, it's the other way around: private capital is invested in technology, and later, motivated by jobs that have become available, students flock to universities (paying much of cost themselves) so that they might be trained in an appropriate field. Unfortunately, Business does not do all its business this way around.

But how would you ever know there was a problem, if the only data that informed you were the numbers of students doing courses in different fields? In Australia, we are locked into an downhill spiral: if the jobs aren't there then the students won't do the courses, and because the students don't do the courses then there's no motivation to invest and create the jobs.

John O'Connor [President of the Australian Institute of Physics] is right: this spiral is indeed condemning us to `a never-ending fate of catch-up with more enlightened countries.' The spiral is already negatively affecting Australia's economy. We cannot even produce the graduates in the enabling sciences, such as mathematics, that employers demand; even less can our universities' run-down enabling science departments help to train engineers and other applied scientists.

The SMH editorial rightly draws attention to the pivotal role that the enabling sciences play in ensuring Australia's security. It calls to mind a short article by General William Odom (US Army, Ret.), published only last September, which read in part:

While serving as the director of the National Security Agency, I realized that world-class mathematicians devoted to cryptology and cryptanalysis were critical for success. I was even more fascinated when I was made aware that continuing advances in mathematics are no less critical to breakthroughs in all of science and technology.[1]

[1] Odom, W.E. (2002). Sustaining the momentum. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, vol. 49 (8), p. 885.