Fun_People Archive
17 Dec
An interesting viewpoint

Date: Sat, 17 Dec 94 15:47:21 PST
To: Fun_People
Subject: An interesting viewpoint

From: Gordon Banks <geb@DSL.PITT.EDU>

I was at a lecture by Freeman Dyson, and someone asked him why he thought
his generation produced so many good British physicists.  His answer was
that when he was a child, physics was not taught in the elite schools.
They learned Latin, Greek, History, Literature, and Mathematics.  Science
wasn't for cultured people.  So the smart kids learned science on their
own and so didn't have the love of it extinguished by scholastic
mediocrity.  He said the same thing would happen to computer science, viz.
now that computers were being taught in the public schools, we probably
would not have a lot of great computer scientists in the future.

© 1994 Peter Langston