> Mathematicians are paid to prove theorems
lol who is paying for this? Mathematicians are generally paid to do other things and get to do this kind of work as a side effect.
lol who is paying for this? Mathematicians are generally paid to do other things and get to do this kind of work as a side effect.
On a more abstract level they are paid to bring funding and prestige to the university, but that often goes through the route of papers. And papers often involve proving theorems.
They have to publish papers to get tenure but the university doesn't pay most math faculty for it.
If they want to get paid for research they apply for grants and get the max of a third more salary.
Most other departments make getting grant money a prerequisite for tenure. Math departments typically don't.
So in most math departments faculty members don't bother with grants. Usually only a minority of them do because they want more money.
They're not paid to do research.
Actually, it doesn't. Both math departments I'm familiar with had faculty members who published only to get tenure, and never published again until they retired.
But if they didn't teach (or taught extremely poorly), they got fired, even though they had tenure. If you didn't show up to a scheduled class a number of times, you got in trouble.
I know you weren't saying this, but it's frustrating reading so many comments about mathematicians "getting paid to have fun and good riddance". No - the majority of what they do is teach non-math students. If people here don't like that, by all means dissolve the departments and have the engineering departments teach math.