Manil Suri, 48, is by day a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. By night, he is a novelist, creating narratives set in his native India. From The New York Times:
Q.Have there been many mathematician-novelists?
A. Lewis Carroll. He was sort of a mathematician. There are other people who’ve done something similar. Apostolos Doxiadis wrote “Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture,” and he was a mathematician. There’s someone in Argentina who wrote a short novella on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. So there’s a sprinkling of them. But it’s not like medicine, where there’s a tradition of literary doctors. Mathematics and literature, they seem divergent fields. In mathematics you have a lot of constraints, whereas in literature, you can make your story come out the way you’d like it to.
Q. Are there areas where math and writing converge?
A. Actually, there are a few. If you’re writing and plotting the path of your characters, you have to consider the different directions they might go. “If I move something there, what will happen with this other thing?” Or, “How will the characters interact, if they do this or that?”
In mathematics, in place of characters, you have variables or unknowns. If I’m trying to plot a theorem, I try to imagine these variables interacting with each other. The boundary of their interaction is the theorem.
A nationwide survey of Indian scientists shows that they are as comfortable with seeking the blessings of the resident God as they are with embracing stem cell research. Seema Singh in Mint:
Science is all about empirical inquiry and objective results, but Indian scientists don’t appear to be divorced from their culture and ethos. The largest ever nationwide survey of Indian scientists shows that they are as comfortable with seeking the blessings of the resident God at Tirumala before a rocket launch as they are with embracing stem cell research.
The study, “Worldviews and Opinions of Scientists in India”, which was released at the United Nations in New York on Thursday, has been conducted by the Institute of the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC) of Trinity College in Connecticut, US, and assisted by the Centre for Inquiry India. It sampled 1,100 participants from 130 universities and research institutes in the country between July 2007 and January 2008.
Among other findings, the study shows that only 8% of Indian scientists express ethical reservations about genetic engineering and stem cell research, and 90% agree with the teaching of traditional Ayurvedic medicine in university courses. A large section, 56%, considers mixed economy as the preferred economic model, whereas 21% favour free market and 9% back socialism. Also, 6% think the village-based system is better while 8% are unsure.
Can a partnership between a cheap robot and a carnivore with an exquisite sense of smell aid the hunt for buried landmines? Engineer Thrishantha Nanayakkara and colleagues at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka have come up with an unusual solution.
What will happen when the two most populous nations on Earth join scientific forces? Mara Hvistendahl in Seed Magazine:
In 1956, China started building a road through Aksai Chin, a remote region of the Himalayas claimed by India. When Indian leaders learned about the move-which, due to the area’s inaccessibility, didn’t happen until a couple of years later-they were incensed. By 1962, the two countries were battling it out between the peaks of the Himalayas in what’s now known as the Sino-Indian War. Today, though shelling has stopped, the border dispute persists. Every few years, there’s a diplomatic row that serves, more than anything else, to keep political and cultural exchanges between these two neighboring giants to a minimum.
There may be an opening, however, as both nations realize their mutual scientific ambitions. China and India both possess rich science-cultural legacies: Prior to the 15th century when the European renaissance surged, the Chinese were consistent technological and scientific innovators, while among other significant advances, Indian mathematicians invented the decimal system. Today, both China and India are focusing heavily on scientific investment-China in areas like stem cell research and nanoscience and India in information technology. As these two nations strive to develop and innovate, they have started to look across their fractious frontier and agree to work together for mutual scientific gain.
Deb Roy wants to make robots smarter by getting them to imitate his kid. From Scientific American:
When Deb Roy and his wife have overnight guests that might encounter their two-and-a-half-year-old son-the couple is withholding his name to protect his privacy-the first thing they do is ask their visitors to fill out a consent form. Unusual, for sure, but the couple is merely trying to make people aware that their actions and voices may be captured by the 11 fish-eye cameras and 14 microphones hidden around their Cambridge, Mass., home listening in on nearly every sound their son has ever uttered. The two main goals of the setup: to understand how children acquire language and use the intelligence gleaned to teach robots to talk.
Roy, 39, head of the cognitive machines group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, is documenting every parent-child “conversation” in what he calls the Human Speechome Project.
If heat, light and noise pollution continue to grow, a time will come when astronomers would be forced to observe the universe from space. Eminent astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar in The Indian Express:
On a visit to Chile, I had the opportunity of visiting Paranal, a location in the Atacama desert to the north. Paranal is the site of the world’s largest optical telescope system operated by the European Southern Observatory. It has four telescopes, each with a mirror of an eight-metre diameter. So when they work together, they have a light collecting area of around 200 square metre, the size of a large urban flat. Indeed, astronomers have come a long way since four centuries ago Galileo first trained his pioneering telescope of some four-centimetre diameter on the sky.
After a two-hour drive from Antofagasta, through the rocks and sands of the desert, we could see the white domes of the telescopes on a high plateau. However, when the ESO transport set us down in front of the residency or the guest house for the observing astronomers and technicians I could not see any building in front. There was an upside-down dish-like structure covering the ground some 50 metre away and a paved path led to it. There, one encountered a gateway, crossing which, one was transported into something veritably out of science fiction.
In Harvard Magazine, profile of Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, professor of applied mathematics:
“Just because something is familiar doesn’t mean you understand it. That is the common fallacy that all adults make-and no child ever does,” says Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, England de Valpine professor of applied mathematics. Mahadevan enjoys explaining mathematically the phenomena of everyday life: practicing the old-fashioned method of scientific inquiry called natural philosophy, where one wonders about everything.
…Mahadevan, who grew up in India, tells a traditional story about Krishna where mud becomes metaphor. “In Hindu mythology, Krishna is divine,” he begins. “However, because there was a prophecy that he would overthrow an evil king, his origins when he was a baby were hidden from almost everybody. So when Krishna was born, his mother surreptitiously sent him away to be brought up by a foster mother who didn’t know who he was. As in all mythologies, there were premonitions [of greatness], but growing up with his foster mother, he would go out like all children and play in the mud. One day he started to eat the mud, putting it in his mouth. And his [foster] mother, from afar, said, ‘Don’t do it.’” Krishna kept eating the mud. “Again [she] said, ‘Don’t do it,’ and yet he continued. So she came up to him, and when she opened his mouth to take out the mud, she looked-and she saw the universe.
Halfway between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole in an archipelago called Svalbard, three enormous caverns have been blasted 130 m into the permafrost. Called the doomsday vault, it will be a Noah’s Ark of food in the event of a global catastrophe. Among the world’s 45,000 most important seeds stored in this Svalbard Global Seed Vault, there will be quite a bit of India too.
Seeds of sorghum, pearl millet, chickpea, pigeonpea, groundnut and six small millets will be transferred by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) from its headquarters in Patencheru, near Hyderabad to this location, 1000 km from the Arctic.
In a wide-ranging talk at a recent TED conference (www.ted.com), neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.
This image of India and Pakistan was captured by the MODIS on the Aqua satellite on February 14, 2008. [MODIS is a key instrument on the satellite.] On the left side of the image is the Indus River. The Indus River drains into the Arabian Sea - there is some sediment visible there, where the waters mix. The India-Pakistan border is just east of Indus River, with Pakistan to the west and India to the east. East of the Indus are patches of white, which are the salt flats in Gujarat, India.
Cutting across the top right corner is the Ganges River - just west of the river is a large circular gray patch, which is the city of New Delhi. Along the Ganges and east of it, gray smog sits along the foothills of the Himalayas, trapped there by the height of the mountains.
In India, as frog species soar, so do battles over who found them. Jacob P. Coshy in Mint:
Pretty much like the Indian economy, the number of new frog species in the country appears to have boomed. In the seven years ended 2007, 18 new species have been discovered from the Western Ghats - the largest find in any decade in the last 100 years…
… the spurt in discovery of new species of frogs in the Western Ghats has encountered a controversy, following a dispute over the veracity of one of the claims. It has, in its wake, raised questions on the process and the ethics, particularly with respect to the practice of killing the frogs to preserve a specimen associated with the discovery of a new species.
In Mint Lounge, Seema Singh meets CNR Rao, one of India’s best-known scientists.
The lush campus, the neatly arranged potted plants in the courtyard of his home-office and the 90-year-old trees standing majestically in his backyard, make me wonder if all this greenery has anything to do with C.N.R. Rao’s fountain of energy. At 74, the chairman of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister and Linus Pauling Research Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) is as busy as he was almost 50 years ago, when he joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 1959, after returning from Purdue University.
“I am the only scientist here who has witnessed IISc’s golden jubilee and will now be part of the centenary celebrations next year,” he says. He makes a quintessential portrait of a scientist-glasses, frizzy hair, and an air of authority as well as nonchalance for all things mundane and profound.
Associated Press reports on Arthur C Clarke’s recent 90th birthday
Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke listed three wishes on his 90th birthday: for the world to embrace cleaner energy resources, for a lasting peace in his adopted home, Sri Lanka, and for evidence of extraterrestrial beings.
“I have always believed that we are not alone in this universe,” Clarke said in a speech to a small gathering of scientists, astronauts and government officials Sunday in Colombo where he lives.
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