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From: wollman@hergotha.csail.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Clarke Award Finalists 1993
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2025 17:26:40 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab
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In article <vtlqp2$sqo$1@reader1.panix.com>,
James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:

>My engineer grandfather once mentioned MIT encouraged him to learn 
>German. That would have been the late 1920s, early 1930s. 

German was the common language of mathematics and the physical
sciences in the pre-war period: major journals (like Annalen der
Physik and Angewandte Chemie) were published in German and you needed
to be able to read it, if not necessarily speak or write it.  For
physics and chemistry in particular this lasted into the 1960s and the
requirement at many universities to learn German lasted into the
1980s.  These days most of those journals now publish in English even
if they have kept their German-language titles.

-GAWollman

-- 
Garrett A. Wollman    | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future.  This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers.         | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)