Penn

Nice first impressions. Penn's good. I am enjoying it; especially the courses part. May be it's the Matak in me speaking :) Incidentally, one of my profs happens to be a Feynman's student (his masters thesis co-mentor was Feynman), and the other one, V.Balki's (Indian Feynman?) first PhD student !

Will keep updated about the rest soon!

Law Making

I was traveling on a bus from Kalpakkam to Chennai. As soon as the bus entered Thiruvanmiyur, there was a huge traffic jam. And what I observed was, large cars moving on the road with not more than 1,2 people inside them. Sitting in the bus, I day-dreamt of making a law which allows cars on main roads only if they have atleast 3 people in them during rush hours. Next few seconds I was proud of identifying a solution to one of the serious problems that India is facing.

Then came the question of what if there is substantial amount of luggage and no place for the second person to fit in. Then I added a clause to my older statement- cars will be allowed only if they carry an equivalent of 3 people or more on the main road during rush hours. Equivalence of cargo to people can be established based on some standards and statistics.

But then a very apparent loop hole in this proposition is what if people just carry some dead load on the name of luggage whenever they want to go single? The situation will be back to square 1.

I thought of it for a day or so, and from then onwards started respecting the law-makers !

My Philosophy of Mathematics (MA 001)

I was the Maths and Science secretary of my school during my tenth standard. During the investiture ceremony, I marched onto the stage and collected a badge from the chief-guest which read 'Science Secretary'- (no maths). I took oath infront of the chief-guest as the Maths and Science secretary, though. With a bit of surprise, as if the maths part missing on the badge was my mistake, the chief-guest asked me why it was so. Immediately, I retorted saying, 'Math is the queen of sciences, which means it's a part of sciences. So science infact, is a superset- and adding a math to it would be redundant.'

The chief-guest seemed pretty satisfied, but it was my principal who had a problem. He was quick enough to react and snatch away my moment by saying, 'Math is not the queen of sciences. What makes you think so?' I didn't have an answer then. My only reaction was to despise him for his untimely remark. I was determined to butt down my principal on some other occasion, and hence started reflecting on why math can be called the queen of sciences.

With the passage of time I got answers, not to disprove my principal's statement, but to prove them. Balki in one of his lectures remarked, 'math is a tool to understand physics/science'. Well, I now feel it is something more than just a tool. I would love to look at math as the language of the universe. And science as a human effort to understand this language of the universe.

Think of it this way. A protein is folding itself in a particular way because it needs to minimise its statistical potential- a mathematical operation on a mathematical quantity. So, a proteins are in otherwords, the set of minima of set containing different statistical potentials (translated into english). Similarly music may be seen as a subset of all those functions of frequency with a function called power density proportional to 1/f (formal definitions are yet being researched on; frequency is a inturn a function of time, which is one of the dimensions in the world). Matter is the set of all the solutions of Schrodinger equation. Light is the set of ordered pair (E,B) satisfying four Maxwells equations (in 3 dimensions). Consider a transistor, a quantum mechanical device. It is easy to see that it can have, may be a complicated, nevertheless, a mathematical definition. Infact one can trace its existence back to infinite dimensional spaces, seemingly abstract concept for many of us, the real world champions. Give me any phenomena/process/device, I can assert comfortably that it can be converted into a mathematical operation/ set of mathematical operations on a mathematical functional or a set of mathematical functionals.

The real world is a graphical representation of the mathematical equations from which it's made of!. So what the scientists are doing is essentially making a graphical representation of the information nature has conveyed through its language.

What is called the real world depends on how much of nature's mathematics understood by our mathematicians, has been attributed to physical systems by our scientists. As we understand and attribute more of it, our sense of the word real keeps broadening. Infact, I would suggest real world be called the understood world. Or else, I am afraid, we may be doing the exercise of a frog in the well that thinks that the well is its complete world. 80 years ago, the real world consisted of only three dimensions. Later looking at the simplicity in Maxwells equations expressed in 4 dimensions, scientists thought perhaps universe operates in 4 dimensions, and what we call real should be expanded. Mathematicians worked in n dimensions way before that and even tended n to infinity. Abstract mathematics, which was seen as mathematics done by some geeks just for fun, started finding its physical application. Group theory in particle physics, vector spaces in devices are classic examples.

Nature explained itself to us in a language called mathematics. I would love to extrapolate this to such an extent that if Gods were to exist, they communicate- not in Sanskrit, Hebrew or Arabic, but in Mathematics. Now, if a Telugu person were to understand Tamil culture, he would explore it to the fullest if he learns Tamil first. Similarly if a human being were to understand nature, rather-nature's culture', he would better learn mathematics. Kudos to all people pursuing mathematics for taking their first step in understanding the nature's culture.

In the next post I would like to share my thoughts on the process of mathematics- how would it have evolved! Wait for it. For now, I would love to welcome some interesting/ refreshing remarks/discussions on my take on mathematics.

Mayawati's Brilliance

I was watching NDTV's panel discussion on Mayawati unveiling her own statue. Here is a prologue to that discussion: To a question on why she wasted so much of tax payers money, she retorted back with an absolutely irrelevant answer. She infact released a booklet in a press conference which detailed how the Congress and the BJP are not the parties that Dalits should look forward for. She came up with issues like why a dalit-ki-beti can't become the PM of the country under congress' regime.

Whaaw, what a trap! Even the best of the journalists like Sreenivasan Jain of the NDTV have fallen for it. Nobody discussed on unvieling her statues; rather this discussion went on to caste politics. I saw almost a repeat of it happening with Sagarika Ghoshe' panel in the CNN-IBN an hour later. Any politician ready to criticise her unvieling of statues is bound to get questions based on caste politics, from the media. In this way the main issue would trivially be sidelined for a sensitive issue. Especially with diplomacy being the order of the day. Utter brilliance! Mayawati has exposed and skillfully made use of the fragility of the indian politics. She deserves a statue for this :P

After being successfully able to con the media and shut the mouths of the rest of the politicians (this issue came up yesterday, there was no mention of it in the news today), I very much want to wait and see how this dalit-ki-beti is going to con the supreme court. Quite an interesting battle on cards! If she can successfully pull it off, I will be more than happy to visit all her 50 statues and pay my tributes :P.

Addendum 2: (Courtesy Danda)

What is common between SRK and Mahatma Gandhi?











Both went to SA, got insulted and came back !

Addendum

(To the previous post.)

21. Ross Taylor walking across the wicket to hit the ball for a maximum

22. Emergence of a completely new terminology in which a sixer is called a D.L.Effer

23. Every moment of the grand finale

24. And ofcourse, the victorious gults

So make that 24 folks. 21 and 22 have been forgotten in the previous post. 23 and 24 had to come because of that brilliant match.

20 Things Why I Remember IPL 2

1. Rise of Kumble as one of the three best captains the other two being MS and Shane, and ofcourse rise of Sachin as the worst captain:. The age old adage, think like MS or think like Warne, is now modified to think like MS or like Warne or like Kumble, but never like Sachin

2. Clash of the legends, Sizzling Sachin vs Magician Warne

3. Manish Pandey, the wall of the making

4. Siva Mani

5. Dravid's fearless and confident batting style

6. Gilly's 50 from, guess what- 17

7. Kumble's 5/5 and Murali's 2/8 (against Punjab)

8. The fall of Bollywood and associated teams - with Katrina as an exception, and the rise of South India and Gult patronised teams ! (in your face- all you gult haters)

9. The fake IPL and Appam Chutiya

10. The jinxed Kolkata roaring towards the end

11. Dwayne Smith's half century during whose innings DC almost seemed like winning the match against CSK (DC lost by 70+ runs)

12. The cheer leaders

13. Introduction of the super over, and Yousuf Pathan's cameos

14. Haydos performance in almost every match

15. Peter ka beta's utter failure (Schedenfraude here!)

16. Mandira Bedi and Ramiz Raja consistantly proving their incompetance for their jobs

17. The narmad third wing's 'fantasy IPL' craze

18. Entertainment during those looong days of thesis writing

19. Giving me a topic for a come back post

20. Last but not the least, emerging as a phenomena for cutting off all those boring ManU vs Liverpool/ Chelsea vs Barca discussions. When somebody starts the footer talk, one can very adeptly change the course of the discussion by introducing IPL ( told out of experience)

Looking forward for the grand finale!