Interestingly, he's re-learning Latin as a fun independent project, and has been reading the Vulgate in conjunction with re-memorizing paradigms.
That's in addition to his project where he made a New Year's resolution to read one piece of literature per week, whether a play or a novel or whatnot (it's almost a year, and he's read 76).
He also was telling me that when he decided to go into math, his immigrant father expressed deep concern over his choice out of fear that he would become a very very narrow person, which makes me wonder whether he's normal among U.S. mathematicians because of his Polish heritage, and how there mathematicians can have sides of themselves besides something weird and cerebral - that is, in the Old World, mathematicians can be full people who engage in and are a part of other high culture.
He also confessed that he's always thought it's very cool that I know Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was very struck by that when we first met years ago (he's blurring facts a bit, though, I didn't know any Hebrew then).
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