Two Cultures

Before taking this class, I have never thought about, let alone questioning, the separation of two cultures, art and science. This separation is embedded in and enhanced by our education system. When we're in college, most of us will choose one major that can be classified into either art or science. We rarely see people taking two "polarized" majors together. And our school makes this distinction even more clearly by separating the campus into north and south campus. 

UCLA Science Court

UCLA Sculpture Garden

I am a student majoring in Applied Mathematics, which would be considered very "scientific". Same as most other students in my major, I hardly visit the north campus. Professor Vesna mentioned the word “stereotype” in the lecture video, and I think this word is key to the separation between two cultures. When our education system pushes us to identify ourselves with one of the stereotypes, we will more or less stop interacting with the other culture that we don’t identify with. However, as the video “Changing Education Paradigm” points out, this model may not be the most optimized, because “Collaboration is the stuff of growth”. And I have two examples that I think best illustrates the idea that collaboration between these two cultures may create better results.

The first one would be Leonardo Da Vinci, who is most well known for the diverse fields of arts and sciences. He is no doubt one of the greatest painter in history, but different from most artists, a lot of his works encompass amazing accuracy and precision of body structures. His paintings exemplify not just aesthetic gifts, but also scientific anatomy of human bodies.

One of Da Vinci's Skeleton Sketch

 The second one is financial engineering, a field that I plan to study in graduate school. It is a newly emerging field that is created a few years ago. It’s about applying mathematical and programming techniques to financial theories. While finance could be considered more theoretical and literal, we can now complement it with a more scientific approach. It helps to better measure market risks and predict the pattern of growth of financial products.

I believe that as our society progresses, we will begin to see more and more collaborations and interactions between two cultures, just like what Brockton indicates in his book. The conflict will be resolved in the Third Culture. 

Citations

Changing Education Paradigms. Perf. Sir Ken Robinson. YouTube. Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, 14 Oct. 2010. Web. <http://youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U>.

Snow, C. P. “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Reading. 1959. New York: Cambridge UP, 1961. Print.

Brockman, John. The Third Culture. N.p.: n.p., 1995. Print.

N, N. (n.d.). Northlands. Retrieved April 04, 2016, from http://narimanhb.com/tag/financial-engineering/