Mathematics Ph.D program foreign language requirement I will soon be attending a Ph.D program in mathematics. I do not know how common this practice is, but the department has a requirement that graduate students must learn a foreign language and be able to read and write mathematics in that language. The three choices are French, German, or Russian. I personally have no preference on which to learn, but I was wondering if there were other reasons that would make one language more advantageous over the others in terms of a general mathematical career. Thanks in advance in any response.
While it may be true that, if one had to pick a single language in which to read mathematics, English would currently be the best choice, ... it is certainly not the case (as many people do claim) that these days there's an English version of anything worthwhile. True, it is possible to "get by" reading only English, but there are little problems now and then.

In particular, for mathematics, perhaps unlike computer science, things don't really become "wrong" or obsolete (although they certainly can become less stylish), and until about WWII the cutting-edge writing in mathematics was mostly in French and German. (Depending on the epoch, Russians often wrote in French or German, as did Japanese in those times. English was not the lingua franca... :)

So, for people in mathematics of roughly my age, it was necessary to have some reading knowledge of French and German to be professionally competent in those years. And many of the classics of those times have not been supplanted by English-language versions, and are still relevant at least as subtle background to contemporary work.

Also, though I don't make a hobby of tracking this, it is my impression that many French mathematicians in number theory and automorphic forms and representation theory certainly do write in French, and at a level and substance that is not at all automagically transferred to English-language writing. And many pieces in Seminaire Bourbaki, a wonderful resource, continue to be in French.