It is a bit more complex than that. My father (American) learned German because his mother considered it "the language of science". That attitude is mostly gone.
When I studied computer science (which, at my university in the United States was still a part of the mathematics faculty), we were required to study one of German, French, or Russian, as those were historical languages of math.
Seems a bit quaint now - but at least it got me to learn German and even spend six months studying at the University of Heidelberg.
> It is a bit more complex than that. My father (American) learned German because his mother considered it "the language of science". That attitude is mostly gone.
When my dad did his chemistry degrees (a bachelors and a masters by research) in the late 1960s / early 1970s (Australia), they made him do a unit on how to read German, because that is the language of a lot of the older chemistry literature. I don’t think they care anywhere near as much about German in chemistry nowadays, although (from what I understand) learning to read German is still an expectation for some humanities PhDs (such as Egyptology)
Seems a bit quaint now - but at least it got me to learn German and even spend six months studying at the University of Heidelberg.