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To: doc30
Now, avoiding rough humor. My university had a course similar to the Harvard course. We did 4 hours of class a week, at night, and then tens of hours of homework. It was called Experimental Calculus I. Thing had its own "experimental" deviant nomenclature as well ~

There was one woman in the class ~ young lady with an incredible figure and bright red hair. Absolutely striking. Oh, yes.

She got an A.

Her dad was a math professor too.

She didn't go on to Experimental Calculus II. Something like 3 or 4 people did, I didn't either. Instead, everybody who dropped out went to the regular Calculus the next semester, learned an entirely new nomenclature, and generally found it to be a pud course with only 10 to 15 hours homework needed.

I think the redhead was the only woman in Calculus II!

This was a huge university with 30,000 students on the main campus too.

Back in those days it was typically the case that women did not take Calculus.

12 posted on 03/11/2008 6:44:49 AM PDT by muawiyah
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To: muawiyah
I'm still confused - how exactly is math sexist? In what manner does differential calculus exclude women? Now it is true there is more thinking and less talking than say women's studies, but maybe it is that young women are not attracted to studious, socially-reserved engineering types so they choose to socialize in marketing etc.

If there is a problem to be fixed, it is that too many soft programs do not have enough math and physics. Solution: make Calc III a requirement for all undergraduate degrees (including teaching and education) and statistics, linear algebra and differential equations graduate requirements for all but humanities. That should balance the numbers nicely.

20 posted on 03/11/2008 7:15:20 AM PDT by DaveyB (Ignorance is part of the human condition - atheism makes it permanent!)
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To: muawiyah
Her dad was a math professor too.

Like my wife: her father was a math professor and she can still look at a page full of equations and understand what she is looking at 30 years after her last math class. She was also accepted into a physics program at a university in Europe.

She gave that up and earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy.

Math ability is largely genetic and largely male: my father and all of my uncles were great math students and almost all my male cousins (and 1 female) became engineers, mathematicians or specialized in quantitative finance. My brother got a degree in finance (after 15 years in the US Army) & I wound up working as a computer programmer.

29 posted on 03/11/2008 8:13:52 AM PDT by pierrem15 (Charles Martel: past and future of France)
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