Abstract
GREAT BRITAIN is beginning to appreciate the importance of broadening the education of the mathe-matician and the scientific worker. In all subjects new knowledge has been and is piling up at a great rate. The universities demand more and more for a degree, and the student is constantly becoming more overloaded. At the same time, the lines of demarcation between the subjects are breaking down, and the importance for every scientific worker of a knowledge of allied sciences is growing greater every day. Sir William Pope expounded this idea in a lecture delivered in July last before the Royal Society of Arts. He pointed out the importance for chemists of a knowledge of physics and the need of a reform by which natural philosophy (that is, physics and chemistry) would become a single whole instead of being made up of half-a-dozen disconnected subjects. He would unite them into one by emphasising the fact that they are all based upon the electronic constitution of matter and energy. The importance of a knowledge of physics to the mathematician was emphasised at the conference held recently at the University College of Southampton, and the October issue of the Mathematical Gazette contains a valuable article by Prof. Piaggio on the subject. The main value of this article lies in the author's discussion of the means by which it can be made possible for the mathematician to attain a knowledge of physics in addition to mathematics within a reasonable time. He goes through the \arious branches of applied mathematics as at present taught at universities and picks out a considerable number of items that could well be dropped in order to make room for more important matter.
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Current Topics and Events. Nature 114, 690–693 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/114690c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/114690c0