The yanks can be brutal, eh :-)

Here in Denmark, "the Danish Bernie Madoff", Stein Bagger, just got 7 years. Of course he only swindled about 150 million dollars, so proportionately he got off worse.

+ one reasonably prestigious university

I, for one, welcome our new Jewish-Asian Hybrid Overlords.

Back in the day ... I did my PhD work on a university-wide mainframe which cam equipped with a seriously dubious scheduling algorithm and a whole lot of quota restrictions on job queues, job output queues, cpu usage etc. The critical parameter was the five-minutes-cpu per job limit. The only way to get around this was the self-resubmitting job which, when it got to 4:30 minutes cpu, would write its state to disc and resubmit itself using the written state as input. The fun, of course, was avoiding creating a rabbit job which would reproduce itself uncontrollably bringing the entire university's theoretical research program to a grinding halt. Oh happy days.

Didn't most of the tricks just boil down to "Define one big integer array in a common block and then pack all your data, whatever its type, into that"? All my PhD research was done with code like that. It was mostly written by my supervisor years and years before even that and I never actually learned how it worked.

Sad, but not new. I was privately educated in the 70s/80s and I can assure you that "teaching to the test" was alive and kicking then. I actually think it was worse in humanities subjects than the sciences. I managed fantastic results in, for example, English and French, without any appreciation of literature or any ability to speak or understand French. But I could recognise a subjunctive in either language at 50 paces.

With regard to maths, I don't see why this is necessarily true. Given the limited amount of time in the school curriculum, I would have thought it would be quite possible to change the relative emphases given to geometry, algebra & calculus, probability and statistics, and discrete mathematics to reflect changing fashions and needs. I remember doing groups & fields in the 6th form but I don't think I would have been profoundly disadvantaged if we had used the time instead to learn, say, some of the elements of complex analysis.

Four miles! Assuming that the school is situated four miles south of the north pole.

mid-19th Century, according to an old episode of QI I was watching at the weekend.

Do you mean it becomes a contract when the payment is accepted by the advertiser? If so, I wonder what constitutes "accepting payment" in an electronic transaction. Is there relevant case law?

This discussion reminds me a little of my first graduate-level class in magnetohydrodynamics. I was the only person in the room who'd never taken a class in fluid dynamics. Oops. Weirdly enough, I ended up doing a PhD in ... magnetohydrodynamics.

I think this is a really bad choice (though a very interesting book). You won't find the heat equation, the wave equation, the Helmholtz equation, the Navier-Stokes equation etc. anywhere in there.

I has lunch with Arnol'd once. Funny guy, great expositor.

Thinking about the original question, wouldn't the whole of Landau & Lifschitz be a good place to start? There definitely needs to be a good fluid dynamics text in there somewhere - in my day Batchelor was popular but I wonder if that's too old-fashioned nowadays.