oahz said:
are there are disproportionate number left handed people in math and physics?
I would say exactly the opposite. Math and physics are very much left-brain sciences, so my guess is that right-handedness would prevail, although I don't have any solid data on the statistics, and I'm sure there are some notable exceptions. I for one happen to believe that there is a lot in the folk concept of "right-brain" versus "left brain" thinking and thinkers. It's one of those seemingly oversimplified psychological theories you learn in school that is actually accurate to some degree. There's a large literature on the subject. See Geschwind and especially Gazzaniga's new book, "Human":
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0018QSO6M/?tag=pfamazon01-20
I feel that a fundamental problem in the math teaching curricula, at least in the US, is that math and perhaps to a lesser extent physics teachers are primarily left-brain thinkers. Left brain thinkers more than right brain thinkers are much more comfortable dealing with abstract symbols in a hierarchical-sequential fashion than right brain thinkers. Right brain thinkers tend to learn mathematical relations better through analogies to real-world experience. They just don't seem to "get it" through solely working with abstract symbols and concepts like left brain thinkers do. This creates a huge problem when you have left brain instructors, which almost all math teachers are, trying to teach right brain students, like myself. I've found that, in order for me to learn higher mathematics, I need to find that needle in the haystack presenter that themselves think in a right-brain fashion. It's not easy to find, but they're out there. Again, though, this just has been my personal experience.
Edit: Btw, I'm definitively right handed, but I consider myself primarily a right brain thinker, so, although I think handedness can be an indication of whether you tend toward left brain or right brain thinking, it's definitley not a hard rule.
One interesting case study on the left-brain right-brain issue is Einstein, who I believe was fundamentally a right brain thinker that got lucky enough to balance his talents or capacities by hitting math hard at an early enough age. We see this in his relative ambivalence in, poor mastery of, and reluctance to rely heavily on mathematics in his early modeling. It's difficult to imagine how he could have come up with those fantasitcal abstractions of GR just by crunching through the equations of existing models. It was the right-brain "architect" in Einstein that came up with GR, it wasn't found through mathematics, math was put to it later.
Although he is remembered as saying that his whole GR experience gave him new sense of respect for math, he still retained a certain ambivalence to it in his later years, typically relying on his assistant "calculating horses," as he called them, to crunch most of the numbers in his models. To me, that is the signature of a right brain thinker. You can contrast that approach to that of Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, and many others of the quantum realm, all of which I think were definitively left brain thinkers. Although Schrodinger was likely a right brain thinker.
