[This is a condensed version of a paper written by one of the present bloggers (Borwein). For the full article, with references, see http://www.carma.newcastle.edu.au/~jb616/psychology.pdf.]
Some years ago, my brother Peter surveyed other academic disciplines. He discovered that students who bitch mightily about calculus professors still prefer the relative certainty of how-and-what we teach-and-assess to the subjectivity of a creative writing course or the rigors of a physics or chemistry laboratory course. Similarly, while I have met my share of micro-managing Deans–who view mathematics with disdain when they look at the size of our research grants or the infrequency of our
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