This is related to the cost of doing experiments and running a lab. My wife is a bio-physicist and goes through $1k is supplies on a good day. In contrast you could run a math lab on almost nothing.

There's this old joke about math departments being the second cheapest to run, since you only need pen, paper, and a trash can. The cheapest department to run is Philosophy, since you only need pen and paper.

>This is related to the cost of doing experiments and running a lab.

Only tangentially. In my engineering department, the expectations on the professor who ran a lab with heavy and expensive equipment were no greater than the one whose work was all computational and just needed a bunch of PC's to run simulations on.

The biggest cost of running math department is travel costs, but then again, biophysicist probably spend just as much on that.

Interesting. In my school math and physics were part of College of Science and CS was in College of Engineering. Maybe this burden of grant money production is college-based.