MATHEMATICAL TRAINING

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30234, 12 September 1963, Page 4

MATHEMATICAL TRAINING

Harvard Professor’s Views “An applied mathematician ean be trained in about seven years if he has had a reasonably good scientific education, but he is not much good until then,” Professor S. Goldstein, of Harvard University, told a meeting sponsored jointly by the Canterbury branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand and the mathematics department of the University of Canterbury. He was speaking on the importance of applied mathematics in education and research. "You therefore must have a post-graduate applied mathematics school if you want applied mathematicians,” Professor Goldstein said. The study of applied mathematics could not be combined with that of pure mathematics, he added. “Any university suffers when the attempt is made to combine both under one head.” He thought applied mathematics "of great cultural value” because it involved what he considered a broad education, which, he said, was not a snippet of say, Spanish, another of mathematics, and another of biology; the student in such a system was often assumed to be familiar with all the ground in between, but in fact he had only his three snippets. ‘‘The total breadth of the whole never exceeds the breadth of the individual snippets,” said Professor Goldstein, adding that a truly broad education covered as much as possible of contiguous subject*, and this was what applied mathematics did.