4 ms·

"In the class of 1970, only 20 of the 75 students who began the class finished it due to its difficulty." Now I am curious if either BG or RS successfully COMP

by Goosey 16y ago

"In the class of 1970, only 20 of the 75 students who began the class finished it due to its difficulty." Now I am curious if either BG or RS successfully COMPLETED the course (and hell, while we are at how well they did!)

jgg 16y ago
From http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html : To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary "boot camp" class for freshman mathematics "concentrators" at Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit. "We were the math mafia," says Chess with a laugh. "Harvard was nothing, at least compared with the SHP." To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school." Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics. "The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman." No idea about Gates.
- donaq 16y ago
  That was a very interesting look into RMS' youth. Thanks for the link!

by Goosey 16y ago

jgg 16y ago

From http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html : To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary "boot camp" class for freshman mathematics "concentrators" at Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit. "We were the math mafia," says Chess with a laugh. "Harvard was nothing, at least compared with the SHP." To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school." Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics. "The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman." No idea about Gates.

donaq 16y ago
That was a very interesting look into RMS' youth. Thanks for the link!