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I really like the top two answers.

A few points, when I was in school and that was only 5 years ago, I learned Fortran. I learned it because I was starting as a Mechanical Engineer, and one of the heat transfer classes involved solving differential equations via programs. If you wanted to get help from the egg head professors you had to take Fortran because that's what they knew. The Fortran class was Mechanical Engineers and Nuclear Engineers. I believe we were working in Fortran 77 & 90.

One of my friends from college is working on his PhD in physics. He spends his summers and breaks in Los Almos labs, and uses particle accelerators. Anyway - he told me that they use Fortran for their calculations purely because it was easier to translate to the language and it's all math.

Anyway that's just my $.02




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