Goody Claims Russians Stress Basic Sciences

Russian students concentrating in mathematics spend approximately one term out of their five years in colleges studying humanities and other general-education subjects, Richard M. Goody, professor of Meteorology, stated yesterday. Goody returned last week from a 20-day stay at the Universities of Moscow and Leningrad.

He also said that all Soviet students going into meteorology, and presumably several other branches of science, receive a strong basic education in fundamental mathematics and physics. He felt that American colleges and universities, except for Harvard, do not use this approach, with the result that the Soviets have "far more" physical meteorologists with adequate preparation in basic math and physics than does the U.S.

American Approach

The typical United States method is to teach these fundamentals as they are needed for more specialized work. This approach, however, often leads to confusion in understanding fundamental concepts.

Except for this difference in training Goody saw little discrepancy between Russian and American goals or successes in his field. Physical meteorology has direct application to weather control ("You can't control the weather until you understand it"), and is being studied in the light of information obtained by several of the satellites the United States and Russia have put into orbit.

During his stay in Russia, made under a cultural-exchange agreement set up by the universities involved nearly two years ago, Goody spent two weeks in Leningrad and one in Moscow. While in the Soviet Union he gave nine lectures, reading each sentence and then waiting for an interpreter to translate it.

Talked to Students

He also had some chance to talk to students after each speech, and felt that a greater number of them than in this country seriously intended to go on into science.

Among the students' course requirements, Goody noted one on the history of the Communist party, as well as a language requirement most often fulfilled by the study of English. He described the physics and mathematics as "hard," estimating that Russian students cover in five years the same amount of work that an American physics concentrator studies in four years as an undergraduate, together with two more as a graduate student.