Jonah: In my own days as a math undergraduate (old British system: no nonsense about majors and minors, we just did math) it was a running joke that when invited to the room of a female Humanities student, we’d browse her textbooks while she was making coffee; but when they came to our rooms, they never browsed our books.

Studying something really hard — and at the university level, math and the sciences are really hard — makes you a terrible intellectual snob. “They’re giving you a degree just for reading novels?” we’d jeer. “Hoo hoo hoo!” Even discounting for youthful self-regard & arrogance, though, there was a real asymmetry of interest. We math geeks prided ourselves on being decently well-read; and you could have put a fair classical-music ensemble together from my undergradute class of 40-odd. If there was a similar level of math-sci interest in the English department, it kept itself well hidden.

With age comes wisdom, of course, and I’ve met enough super-bright Humanities academics to learn some humility . . . with an assist from the fact that I “hit the wall” around two thirds of the way into my degree course and realized I’d never be a creative mathematician. There are areas of the Humanities — I’d cite history and political science — where real intellectual prowess is on display at least some of the time. Still, early training imprints us, and whatever passing respect I might grant to a great mind in the Humanities, none the less, for me, to the day I die, math and science is it. (“Are them”? Whatever.) Always, when I’m reading a Humanities text, at some point halfway through it, that little voice starts up inside my head, saying: “Oh, there’s nothing rigorous here — only opinion.”

It’s my vague impression, by the way, that the asymmetry of interest I noticed in my college peers has lessened since the 1960s. The proliferation of good pop-science books must have something to do with it. Also TV programs like NOVA and good science journalism in papers like the New York Times and The Economist. From my occasional ventures into current highbrow fiction, it seems that nobody can write a novel nowadays without at least a passing reference to the Uncertainty Principle or gravitational collapse.

I bet the girls from English still don’t browse the math guys’ books, though.