Timeline for How did Milton Babitt teach math at Princeton and research math, without an undergraduate degree in math?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 6, 2020 at 12:57 | comment | added | Peter Shor | Even today, there are people in physics departments who have math PhDs; there are people in math departments who have computer science PhDs; there are people in computer science departments who have physics PhDs. Having the same degree as the department you are in is not a requirement. Music and mathematics are farther away than usual in these situations, but if somebody has the necessary knowledge to teach mathematics, there is no regulatory obstacle to letting them do it. | |
| Aug 16, 2019 at 2:13 | vote | accept | CommunityBot | ||
| Aug 14, 2019 at 6:00 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackAcademia/status/1161517951201304578 | ||
| Aug 13, 2019 at 21:11 | answer | added | Wolfgang Bangerth | timeline score: 10 | |
| Aug 13, 2019 at 20:54 | comment | added | Alexander Woo | The theoretical work that Babbitt did in music was highly mathematical. He essentially worked out all of the additive combinatorics of actions of the dihedral group of 24 elements (and its direct sum with itself) on finite sets. (That's what "musical set theory" means in mathematical terms.) | |
| Aug 13, 2019 at 17:50 | comment | added | Jon Custer | Duplicate of History of Science and Math question. | |
| Aug 13, 2019 at 16:57 | comment | added | BrianH | You may be interested in: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_inflation During the time you could be a doctor or a lawyer with no college degree at all. The "ivy league" also meant close to nothing in the US at the time, it was not synonymous with exclusive, prestigious, or elite - that came later, much more recently. Labor, professions, and higher education has changed tremendously in the last 60-100 years, at least in some ways. | |
| Aug 13, 2019 at 16:50 | review | Close votes | |||
| Aug 18, 2019 at 20:40 | |||||
| Aug 13, 2019 at 16:45 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | Universities set their own hiring standards, and even if they create a requirement to have a degree, they can also waive that requirement as they see fit. I don't think we really have much way of knowing what criteria Princeton used to decide to hire Babbitt in 1938, what rules they might have had, whether any of them were waived, nor why. | |
| Aug 13, 2019 at 16:26 | comment | added | Patricia Shanahan | Even in 1970 I got a programming job with a mathematics degree and no for-credit computer courses. | |
| Aug 13, 2019 at 15:30 | comment | added | StrongBad | I taught in a psychology department without ever having taken a class formally offered by a psychology department. | |
| Aug 13, 2019 at 15:23 | history | asked | user13306 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |