The present precarious situation in America is similar to other historical scenarios. The first we call attention to is the period around the summer of 1968, which was punctuated by the violent and destructive race riots that immediately precedes the Humphrey versus Nixon election. This crisis also happened to be contemporaneous with the blossoming of applied mathematics in the late 1960s due to significant military funding (e.g., for perturbation theory experts active in boundary-layers (Lin, 1976). Moreover, we saw the birth of Computer science departments across America (e.g., https://www.cs.umn.edu/50th-schedule and https://www.colorado.edu/cs/50-years), which sprung from traditional departments in Mathematics and Statistics and Electrical Engineering. We note that computing, which has significantly impacted the course of history since World War II (Dongarra et al., 2018), increased exponentially during this period and gave birth to the first supercomputers (e.g., the CDC 6600 and Cray I) and the field of HPC.