That's focusing on the wrong thing; as I said, "I know it's 10 x 10 x 10 meaning 10^3 I don't need that explanation [for the correct combinations], what I'm looking for is an intuition for why it isn't 10x3".
I was a Science Reference Librarian at John Crerar Library in Chicago in the early 70's, and this sounds very familiar, although we tended to get a slightly more focused set of questions (and our boss Mr. Quinn was much more pleasant!). I love Wikipedia, but the books in our Reference Collection were remarkable.
I can remember the days! I suppose as problems grow in size, it's not too surprising that older methods of coping with what seemed like lots of data are still applicable.
A friend of mine wrote a book about what happened in Germany: Scientists under Hitler : politics and the physics community in the Third Reich by Alan Beyerchen. I'm about a third of the way through it, but they mixed politics with the physical sciences to a remarkable degree, driving away many of the best people and isolating German scientists.
Social "sciences" are always political because they are mostly not science and so is easy to co-opt them. Math doesn't have different results depending on countries political system but social sciences do - tells you all you need to know.
Of Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, the people credited with the establishment of "modern" (pre WWI & WWII) sciences of society all were "political" philosphers | thinkers that looked at the behaviour of societies.
Max Weber (1864 – 1920) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber was a German of some influence, and the pre and inbetween World War periods were a time of intense political debate in France, Germany, and surrounds.
Who are "they" to whom you refer, and what is "political" as opposed to "social" ?
You mean the Nazis? Yes. (As did the Stalinists in their totalitarian state at the same time).
One might guess (and its just that, a guess) that such regimes target the social sciences first because such departments (eg economics, political studies) are adjacent to live politics, the regime's people think they understand them and can make contributions (in reality, trying to take control of course) and of course because the hard sciences require the payment of a hard tax of mathematical skills to say anything useful, which most political hacks do not have.
Every form of government targets in some way the social "sciences". Immagine being in a government where the majority of your social scientists are calling for your removal. Same applies to religious institutions and media
