Last week in Spain, in a bar in old Madrid, I met a fille de joie who was a graduate in Latin and mathematics. Of course, I have no evidence that she had taken her degree, but she could make a good attempt at expanding the binomial theorem, and when, showing off my Horace, I asked if she liked inter silvas Academi verum quarere, she seemed to know exactly what I meant. Neither, it must be said, do I know for sure that she was a lady of the demi-monde, but her subsequent behaviour as she made her way around the room suggested strongly that she was.
Needless to say, George Bernard Shaw's most controversial play came instantly to mind. The heroine of Mrs Warren's Profession, perhaps you may recall, was similarly occupied and qualified, being, inter alia, a mathematician with ambitions to "set up chambers in the city, and work at actuarial calculations and conveyancing". Leaving aside the Latin for a moment, the extent to which life was imitating art was quite uncanny.
And then, as I finished off my Rioja to the appropriate strains of Piaf's Je ne Regrette Rien, it occurred to me that my acquaintance might have made an excellent meteorologist.
To qualify to the highest international standards in the science an honours university degree in mathematics or physics is preferred. Strange as it may seem, considering meteorology for the Leaving Certificate comes under geography, a degree in that latter subject is not, as a rule, seen as an adequate foundation. A modicum of physics is needed to understand the complex atmospheric processes that go to make our weather, and to master the mathematical models that form the basis of numerical weather prediction, or forecasting the weather by computer, a sound education in mathematics is essential.
Meteorologists are also very fond of Latin, and nowhere is this trait more evident than in the way they name their clouds. The word
cirrus, for instance, comes from the Latin word "to curl"; stratus means "spread out"; and cumulus is the Latin word for "heap". These are examples of the genera of clouds, and within each genus are the species, a further sub-division based on shape or structure, or perhaps the physical process in which the a particular cloud has had its origin.
There are 14 species altogether, with names such as fibratus (which means composed of filaments), congestus (sprouting vigorously upwards), floccus (being composed of tufts), or fractus (meaning "ragged"). And then there are "varieties" - such as translucidus perlucidus - which describe, in Latin naturally, further characteristics of each individual element of cloud.