I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy desktop IDE/wordprocessor that works seamlessly using a traditional interface or a LyX-like interface. Merge/buy/replace Overleaf with an online service that syncs reliably with the desktop IDE. And, most importantly and difficultly, create a standard way for generating beautiful web pages (including mobile) from the same LaTeX++ files that can be used to generate beautiful PDFs.
The annual NSF physics budget is roughly a quarter billion dollars. This only needs to make NSF-funded physicists 1% more productive over a decade to justify spending $20M, and the entire world would benefit.
EDIT: Lots of commenters worry that this will end up like various closed-source for-profit tools like Google Docs. But for a closer analogy they should look at some of the excellent free open-source science software being produced with philanthropic funding such as Zotero. Physicists will only adopt it if it makes their lives easier (and maybe not even then...).
EDIT 2: There are some pretty strong parallels between the commenters suggesting this can already be achieved with homegrown tools and the infamous HN Dropbox comment.
The annual NSF physics budget is roughly a quarter billion dollars. This only needs to make NSF-funded physicists 1% more productive over a decade to justify spending $20M, and the entire world would benefit.
EDIT: Lots of commenters worry that this will end up like various closed-source for-profit tools like Google Docs. But for a closer analogy they should look at some of the excellent free open-source science software being produced with philanthropic funding such as Zotero. Physicists will only adopt it if it makes their lives easier (and maybe not even then...).
EDIT 2: There are some pretty strong parallels between the commenters suggesting this can already be achieved with homegrown tools and the infamous HN Dropbox comment.