My Mathematical Journey: Chasing Grants
By: David Bressoud @dbressoud
David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences
Grants are the coin of the realm at top research universities such as Penn State. I know of no departments of mathematics at these universities that have an explicit requirement that a candidate for tenure has received external grant money. But I have asked many of my colleagues at these R1 universities if they have ever seen someone receive tenure who had not been awarded external grants. I have yet to learn of such a person.
The need to receive grants goes beyond gaining tenure. At leading research universities, it is assumed that travel to professional meetings will be supported by one’s grant. The only recourse for those without grants is a personal request to the chair of the department. This contrasts with most liberal arts colleges and many less research-intensive universities where faculty are promised a certain amount of travel money, usually with an established process for requesting additional funds. The amounts may be small, but there usually is an institutional recognition of the need to provide some support for travel.
Given the critical role of professional meetings in supporting and refreshing one’s research activity, to fail to receive the next grant can set up a downward spiral. I quickly became aware of the need to chase grants at Penn State.
When I first arrived, the department was operating under a large multi-person number theory grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). My modest travel needs were accommodated under it. I received my first 3-year NSF research grant in 1981. Subsequent grants carried me through 1988 when I switched to applying for grants with the National Security Agency (NSA). These did not include summer salary support. Being more modest, I assumed that they would be easier to get. I was beginning to question whether my work would continue to earn NSF support
NSF research support in the mathematical sciences is highly competitive. Some years after my move to Macalester I was invited to join a panel evaluating research proposals in combinatorics for the NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS). It was an eye-opening experience, though I need to emphasize that this was only my experience of a quarter century ago. I recall that we had about 25 proposals, maybe a few more. Our task was to triage, to identify about a third that definitely should be funded, a third that might be funded, and a third with essentially no chance of funding. The middle third needed to be ranked as linearly as possible to give the program officers a clear idea of priorities given that money would almost certainly run out before all of the proposals in the middle third were funded. In fact, there was no guarantee that any proposals of the middle third would be funded.
It was discouraging to see that there were only one or two proposals that were totally devoid of merit. Colleagues on the panel agreed that few people submit a proposal to DMS unless they have a good problem and some prospect of making progress. It was even more discouraging to see mathematicians that I knew and respected wind up in the bottom half of the middle third. The top third was almost entirely composed of giants who you knew would continue to generate good problems and make major advances over the next three years. They seemed to draw all of the oxygen out of the system.
One of the difficulties at DMS is the unique nature of research in mathematics, especially pure mathematics. It tends to be a lonely occupation. Few if any of the proposals we rated had co-PIs (co-Principal Investigators). The format of most NSF proposals is a poor fit for mathematics. One is expected to describe a problem and explain why it is important, then detail what will be done to make progress on it, and finally describe the likely outcome. The problem with mathematics is that one seldom knows in advance which problems will be most amenable to attack, or even which problems one is likely to focus on over the next two to three years. My own experience of research in mathematics was to pick up an idea from someone else’s work or to identify a pattern that looked interesting, explore to see if there was an promising structure that I could exploit, and hopefully discover something new and of interest to others. The results of my grants were always an imperfect fit to what I had laid out in my proposal
For that reason, a proven track record, as present among the giants, was the surest route to funding.
This is very different from proposals in the Divisions of Undergraduate Education (DUE) and Research on Learning (DRL) where I would later receive most of my grants and sit on several panels. First of all, these were usually big proposals with several PIs and assorted post-docs and graduate students. Almost every one was led by someone with a reputation that lent it some weight. Both the problems and the methods that would be applied were specific. This made it much easier to assess the potential impact of the research and the likelihood that the goals would be achieved. I never had the same unease over our ranking of DUE or DRL proposals that I had with those in DMS.
I have often expressed my admiration for the Canadian system that awards many small grants, making it easy for early career faculty in mathematics to get the travel money and recognition that will help them on their way. I was also struck by a comment made to me by my doctoral advisor, Emil Grosswald. He said that he stopped applying for grants when in his 40s. He felt that the money he would have received was better spent on early career mathematicians.
My self-imposed pressure to qualify for the next grant peaked in the summer of 1989. That spring Grosswald had died and my first real book, Factorization and Primality Testing, had been published. Grosswald had been something of a father figure for me, and I knew how much my own success meant to him. The book, whose writing I described in the first of these columns on “My Mathematical Journey,” pointed in an entirely new direction.
That summer I engaged in an 8-day Ignatian retreat at the Jesuit Novitiate in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. This is eight days of silence except for daily meetings with a spiritual director. It was a powerful opportunity to take stock of who and where I was. Early in the retreat I had a dream. I was on the Penn State campus. It was winter, with a thin coating of snow over the ground. Over near the engineering buildings (recognized for the huge grants those faculty draw in) I came across a pedestal with an exercise bicycle on top. Faculty were taking turns getting onto the bicycle and seeing how fast they could make it spin. I climbed up with confidence, but as hard as I tried, I could not make the wheel move.
The Jesuit Novitiate and Retreat Center of St. Isaac Jogues in Wernersville, PA. It closed permanently in 2021.
I woke from that dream with the realization that my priorities and efforts were all wrong. I did not know what I should be doing, but I did know that to continue to chase grants for the sake of chasing grants would kill me. I resolved to stop worrying about whether I would receive my next grant and instead to start looking around to see what other opportunities were out there.
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