Jim: > then mathematics is more decadent than I thought, i.e., > deviates from scientific ideals more than I thought.
But it is better to be fair, at least, in the case of Lebesque. As far as I know, or was told, a short while later he got his PhD and a year after that his PhD thesis was published as a book. However, what he did was so great that it was impossible to deny it forever, I suppose. Yet, producing such an important work does not happen to everyone and most of the time doing that is more of a luck than anything else. On the other hand, having experienced a mechanical engineering department, a mathematics department and a business school, my observations are such that they are all as decadent as another. What is different is the scale, that is, the size of what is at stake, not the essence. For example, if you are a solid mechanician in a math department where a bunch of strong fluid dynamicists think for whatever reason that solid mechanics is unimportant or irrelevant, then bad luck, you have no chance of a good life there, supposing that you have any. The same goes for a topologist in a department with a strong group of algebraic topologists as well, not to mention the tensions between pure and applied mathematicians, and the number of examples can be increased to "infinity" without much difficulty. Sabri
