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I bought the Kindle DX with the same purpose in mind (read academic papers, math books, etc) about two years ago, and I'm very pleased with it. PDFs work like a charm (fast page turnover, paper-quality image) and a vast majority of all the books I've ever needed are available for download at sites like library.nu. (If the PDF is a scan and is large then reading is noticeably slower at first, but the file can be optimized and also in my experience vector PDFs are often available). My only complaint is that for some reason it doesn't support the table of contents, so what I do is just bookmark it and when I want to use it I go to the bookmared page, type the page number of the chapter I need and use the go-to function. It's a work around but works reasonably well and takes a few seconds. It's also true that you can't annotate or use the built-in dictionary for PDFs, but personally I don't care much for this.
I do think you do need the DX for this. The ability to fit a single PDF page to the screen, thus avoiding any necessary reformatting, is a big plus when reading technical books or papers. On the other hand, the print in some two-column papers is too small, but you can just zoom in to a part of the page or turn the device over to increase the page width.
One last piece of advice: if you need to read DJVU files as well, you are better off installing Duokan for them than converting to PDF (for faster reading). In my case I can dual boot; the default Kindle operating system is launched by default but whenever I want to read a DJVU file I press some key combination that launches Duokan, and I go back to normal Kindle.
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