What happened to Clay Liftoff? February 9, 2010
Posted by Ben Webster in inside baseball, jobs.trackback
Clay has announced that in 2010, there will be no Liftoff Fellows; they say the program is suspended. The title question was asked in MathOverflow a while back, and while it was rightly shut down there, I’m still kind of curious to know the answer. Did Clay decide Liftoff was not a good program for some reason? Did they not want to spend the money? Obviously, I’m appreciative of the Liftoff program having been a Fellow myself, but its very unclear to me that it results in more math getting done, as opposed to having a few mathematicians pay off student loans faster, which I think was its main effect on me.
My understanding is that CMI’s endowment was impacted by the global financial crisis, and forced some painful cuts in their budget.
Now I wonder if it’s possible to allow mathematical gossip in MO… or build another StackExchange site to allow mathematical gossip and general mathematical blogblag.
It’s pretty clear that mathoverflow is not interested in gossip. You’ll have to keep coming here, for that.
That said, setting up either a StackExchange site or other forum software is very easy indeed, and if someone thinks it would be a worthwhile investment of their time (and money), they should go right ahead!
Terry- I figured that was the case. I was hoping there was a more interesting explanation though, perhaps involving a Liftoff Fellow running off with someone’s wife.
It’s worse than you think. A liftoff fellow ran off with Alfred Nobel’s wife.
@DC: LOL!