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Peter and I worked together in Berkeley in the 50's. At least one of our_______________________________________________
papers has been cited in the last decade.
I post-doc-ed at Imperial College in '59 and we have local people who came
out of Cambridge and elsewhere in Britain. It is true that Theoretical
Physics in Britain was often considered part of the math department. So
what? "Math department" in that context meant something completely
different from Math deparment here.
We have a frequent visitor from Edinburgh who decries the teaching of
elementary mathematics in British secondary schools today. The message is
that Britain is not the place to look for guidance on how to teach. The
bright undergrads that are around currently came from the (now extinct)
Soviet Union. I don't particularly like that fact, but it seems to be
true.
On Thu, 15 Sep 2005, Bernard Cleyet wrote:
In England, at least at Birmingham according to Peter Redmond, Newtonian
mechanics was not taught in the Physics dept., but in the Maths. It's
in a course called Applied Maths.
Gate Keeper Seese always earned A's 'till calc. Then she decried the
lack of application. Algebra, etc. had word problems that made the
math. transparent. She revealed this when I showed her some Phys.
problems involving calc.
bc, who thought a great number of early Physicists were also
Mathematicians (et visa versa).
Hugh Haskell wrote:
At 07:21 -0400 9/15/05, Jeff Weitz wrote:
My colleagues in the math department tell me that they teach math, not
physics, not chemistry, and not cooking. Their averaged out response to
physics is much the same as the averaged out response of members of the
English Department (excuse me, the Department of English). The math
teachers do a very good job of teaching such things as solving algebraic
equations and making graphs, but include almost no discussion of
applications until AP Calculus where they are required to talk a little
about kinematics and related rate problems. For this reason, students
get a shock when they take chem or physics because a problem described
verbally has to be solved using mathematics. The translation has to be
practiced for some time before they get it.
In their effort to teach "mathematics," apparently many math teachers
have forgotten that much of mathematics has real applications to the
real world (I'm afraid that some physics teachers have forgotten that
as well, but it's apparently not so widely done as in math).
This is, I think, a relatively recent phenomenon. I vividly recall my
college calculus course, now more than fifty years past, in which the
textbook (written by the department chair), which I still have and
frequently refer to, had many practical applications, both in
cut
--
"Trust me. I have a lot of experience at this."
General Custer's unremembered message to his men,
just before leading them into the Little Big Horn Valley