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.