Words to leave out of your NSF proposal

"Inequalities," "inclusion," etc. to be expunged from mathematics

Examples of articles that can no longer count on NSF support

Jamelle Bouie’s article in today’s New York Times, with the title “Trump’s War on D.E.I. Is Really a War on Civil Rights,”¹ links to a post on Bluesky by Darby Saxbe with this ominous news:

BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

Some of the keywords that are now off limits are in this list.

So logicians will have to say goodbye to the “law of the excluded middle,” topologists will have to do without “inclusion,” polarization will be a distant memory in Hodge theory, and “inequalities,” like those illustrated above,² will be banished to the DEI dungeon. (If you look at the Bluesky post you’ll see that equality is out as well.)

1. Which everyone should read independently of its implications for mathematics

2. Excerpts from the following articles:

A. Ionescu and S. Klainerman, “On the local extension of Killing vector-fields in Ricci flat manifolds,” Journal of the AMS, Volume 26, Number 2, April 2013, Pages 563–593.

M. Scharlemann, A. A. Thompson, Surgery on a knot in (surface×I), Algebr. Geom. Topol. 9(3): 1825-1835 (2009).

M. Kapovich and A. Kontorovich, On superintegral Kleinian sphere packings, bugs, and arithmetic groups, J. Reine und Angew. Math., 798 (2023), 105–142.

G. Bor, L. Hernândez-Lamoneda, S. Tabachnikov, “Bicycle tracks with hyperbolic monodromy – results and conjectures” (January 2025)