I certainly took a lot of math courses as well. My two years at UCR, three or four of the four courses I would take per quarter were upper division math. At my CC, I took a lot of science courses: 3 sems of CS 4 sems of physics, 2 or 3 of bio. Also took 2 of philosophy,
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Replying to @CreeepyJoe @stubborncurias and
We're really comparing very different systems. An
STEM undergrad typically has no choice of courses at all in the first two years out of three. Also, many of us take 3 years of philosophy in school (I did!
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Replying to @BarbaraFantechi @stubborncurias and
I've never heard of a US high school offering philosophy. Probably fancy private schools. At a community college, you have all the choice because nobody in admin cares what you do as long as you're paying. As a result, many people stay for several years too long...
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Replying to @CreeepyJoe @BarbaraFantechi and
All of the Italian "licei" (which are the more, uhm, theoretical-ish highschools, i.e. the ones that do not prepare you for a job per se) also have mandatory art history, which I believe is one of the perks of our school system.
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Replying to @ramellus @CreeepyJoe and
Fermi studied Latin and Greek at his licei, and memorized Dante! (That said, he never really opened another humanistic text for the rest of his life!)
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Replying to @dschwa8059 @ramellus and
Memorizing Dante is easy-ish. The rhyming pattern ABA BCB CDC... helps a lot! I seriously doubt he never opened a novel for the rest of his life, though.
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Replying to @BarbaraFantechi @dschwa8059 and
My friend the physicist Carlo Rovelli went to the liceo classico rather than the liceo scientifico (I hope I'm using these terms correctly), so he learned Greek as well as (much easier for Italians) Latin. In his later years he's been writing about Greek science.
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Replying to @johncarlosbaez @dschwa8059 and
It's an age thing as well. Until 1969 the only highschool after which you could choose freely your university degree was liceo classico. Rovelli probably started highschool in 1969 or 1970, so the idea that "classico is best" was still strong back then.
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Replying to @BarbaraFantechi @dschwa8059 and
He made it sound like it was a bit unusual for a physicist to do the classico.
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Replying to @johncarlosbaez @dschwa8059 and
Maybe because all the classicisti who studied STEM chose maths? One of my best friends from college (now a full professor) actually won a prize for translation from Greek in school; my advisor and my elder maths sister did classico as well, and it wasn't weird in 70s and 80s.
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Worth mentioning that Hermann Weyl was a superb classics scholar, confident as a reader not only of Attic Greek, but of the much more recondite older versions of the language (such as are needed to read, e.g., Heraclitus.)
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Replying to @MathPrinceps @johncarlosbaez and
André Weyl knew Sanskrit and read the Mahabharata for pleasure.
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Replying to @BarbaraFantechi @MathPrinceps and
I must get hold of the new book The Weyl Conjectures about Andre and Simone...
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