European physics education seems much more advanced/mathematical than US, especially at the graduate level. Why the difference? Are American schools just much more focused on creating experimentalists/applied physicists? Is it because in Europe all the departments are self-contained so, for example, physics students don’t take calculus with engineering students so it can be taught more advanced? I mean, watch the Frederic Schuller lectures on quantum mechanics. He brings up stuff I never heard of, even during my PhD. Or how advanced their calculus classes are. They cover things like the differential of a map, tangent spaces, open sets, etc. My undergraduate calculus was very focused on practical applications, assumed Euclidean three-space, very engineering-y. Or am I just cherry-picking by accident, and neither one is more or less advanced but I’ve stumbled on non-representative examples and anecdotes? I’d love to hear from people who went to school or taught in both places.