What has happened to Berkeley's Math department?

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Cleepople
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Joined: Sun Jun 14, 2020 8:32 pm

What has happened to Berkeley's Math department?

Post by Cleepople » Sun Jun 14, 2020 8:56 pm

What has happened to Berkeley's math department? Many of their most prominent people like Ribet, Vojta, Voiculescu, Lawrence Evans, etc. are close to retirement and/or not very active anymore. So many top faculty members have left, many of whom were in their prime years, or entering their prime years (in their 30s and 40s).

They lost L. Williams and D. Auroux to Harvard, L. Pachter to Caltech. P. Teichner and B. Sturmfels are still technically on the faculty, but they spend most of their time in Germany these days. If you go back a few more years, they lost H. Woodin to Harvard, B. Poonen to MIT, V. Jones to Vanderbilt. They brought in Melanie Wood last year and she just left for Harvard as well.

If you include probability (in the Statistics dept), it gets even worse: they lost A. Sly to Princeton, N. Sun and E. Mossel to MIT, S. Chatterjee to Stanford. Aldous just retired, and Peres also left a few years ago as a result of his disgusting history of misconduct.

In the early nineties, Borcherds, Kontsevich, McMullen, Perelman were all postdocs or faculty in the department—all of whom went on to win a Fields medal. The clear and rapid decline of the nation's preeminent public math department is honestly pretty sad to watch. Is there any way back for Berkeley?



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