Anecdotes-I

Thanks to Vaibhav Devanathan, I have a huge notepad file filled with wonderful anecdotes of scientists and mathematicians albeit in a very haphazard manner, with parts of text transposed from one part to another. To add to my travails, most anecdotes need to be set into prose too; many of them are just points exchanged in e-mails. Nevertheless, some of these anecdotes (or urban legends) are truly remarkable and I feel they are worth the effort of deciphering. But since the task is formidable, I am going to do it bit by bit; so this should be a 3-4 part series starting the current one.

1. A mathematician bought bread once a day from his local baker. The bread was supposed to weigh 1 kilo but afer a year of record keeping the mathematician found a nice normal distribution with mean 950 gr. He called the police and they told the baker to behave himself. One year later the mathematician reported to the police that the baker had not reformed. The police confronted the baker and he said "How could that dastardly math guy have known that we always gave him the largest loaf?

The mathematician then showed the police his record for this year which was again a bell shaped curve with max at 950 gr. but truncated on the left side. The mathematician was none other than Henri Poincare.

2. The Hungarain mathematician Paul Erdos, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history was always making jokes about how old he was. (He said, for example, that he is two and a half billion years old, because in his youth the age of the Earth was known to be two billion years and later was known to be 4.5 billion years.)

He observed one day that the audiences at his talks had been getting larger and larger, to the point where they filled halls so big that his old and feeble voice could not be heard. Erdos speculated as to the cause of this. "I think," he said, "it must be that everyone wants to be able to say "I remember Erdos; why, I even attended his last lecture!"

3. Paul Erdos had his own peculiar language. The following is the glossary of terms that he employed and what they actually meant.

• Supreme Fascist = God (Also abbreviated as SF. A person who hides Erdös's socks, glasses, Hungarian passport and kept the best equations to himself)
• straight from the book = beautiful, elegant proof (book of the SF)
• boss = woman
• slave = man
• captured=married
• liberated = divorced
• recaptured= remarried
• epsilon = child, or a little
• to preach = to deliver a math lecture
• to exist = to do math
• to die = to stop doing math
• trivial being = someone who does not do math
• Joe (USSR) = for Joseph Stalin
• Sam = USA
• Sam and Joe show = international news
• On the long wavelength = communist (red)
• On the short wavelength = fascist (opposite of red)
• noise = music
• poison = alcohol
• my brain is open = I am ready to do mathematics
• when was it alive? = what kind of meat is that?
  

From the journal of misapplied anthropology

This, is by far one of the best polemics against Creationism that I have read in recent times. Aah, I wish that I could imbibe some of this razor sharp wit and the skill to hit the nail on the head with precision! As usual, for people who don't want to read the entire thing, I shall leave some excerpts.

1.

Two gentlemen, both with what one might term a mild delusion -- they are deeply involved with people who don't exist. Both spend a lot of money on this obsession. Both can recite, at length, the putative words, thoughts, and deeds of their fictional obsessions. Both have allowed the ideals expressed by these non-existent beings to shape their lives, and both proudly proclaim their allegience in a sect of followers. Despite this odd obsession, both men hold down jobs, have families, pay taxes, and commit no more than trivial crimes, such as jaywalking, or speeding, or ripping the tags off of mattresses. One of these men, though, has a serious problem -- he won't acknowledge the fictious nature of his fantasy friend. The other one has no such difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy.

Yet, in our society, the former is considered normal and healthy -- while the latter is, at best, a figure of mockery, at worst, a reviled outcast.

The former man, you see, is a 'Christian', and the fictious being he admires is called 'God'. The latter is a 'Trekker' and his fictional focus is called 'Mr. Spock'.

2.

Given how unhealthy and destructive religious beliefs are, you would think fandom would be lauded and praised. No fan of Star Trek ever went to court to demand that warp drive theory be given 'equal time' with the theory of Relativity, as Creationists have done with Evolution. No matter how vicious the Internet flame wars between fans of Star Wars and Star Trek, no one has yet been burnt at the stake for heresy. Not even the most fanatical follower of Mr. Spock would voluntarily limit himself to sex once every seven years (if the opportunity for more frequent matings ever arose), yet thousands of followers of Jesus voluntarily suppress the most fundemental, basic, human urge for their entire lives. Some women even claim to be the BRIDES of this fictional being, living forever in an unconsummated relationship with a man who does not exist. Compared to that, two Trekkers getting married in Klingon garb is postively wholesome. At least the 'Klingons' will probably have sex at some point.

3. This one is my personal favourite:

Religion is needed to inspire men to do good deeds? If a man chooses pacifism because Yoda said that anger is the path to the dark side, rather than because Jesus told him to turn the other cheek, is he any less of a pacifist? Marcus Welby undoubtedly inspired many to become doctors;Perry Mason, many to become lawyers. The usefulness of incarnate ideals to serve as our guides and inspirations is beyond doubt -- but there is grave danger when we forget these incarnations are just the creations of other men.

Shāntatā! Court Chālu Āhe

Where Abraham Lincoln emphatically proclaimed that "this nation shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth" more than a hundred and fifty years ago, interesting questions are being raised while debating the exact role of the judiciary in a democracy in 2008. Understandably, dissenters against the recent Californian lift of the ban on gay and lesbian marriages see the decision as "symptomatic of judicial activism that thwarts the will of the people and their elected representatives". This, I guess definitely raises a higher question, one that is often repeated during the course of history - Should the state machinery enact decisions that are against popular public opinion but which, according to it, are morally expedient? Or should it let the public zeitgeist take its own course? Interestingly, even the supporters of gay and lesbian marriages have "questioned the wisdom of the court intervening when public opinion is shifting toward support of gay marriage in any case".

See this op-ed article in Washington post for some interesting bits of history on the legacy of court rulings in America where the entire nation awakens to an inquitous social institution remembering "the principles of the Declaration of Independence which are guaranteed by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment . . . that all human beings have equal rights . . . and that the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness is inalienable".

So is such judicial intervention a blessing or a curse to the positively evolving moral zeitgeist in a modern democracy? The author succintly concludes:

So was last week's ruling an impetus or impediment to that process? My hunch is that by basing the case for the right to intra-gender marriage so clearly and forcefully on the doctrine of equal rights, the court situated gay marriage not only in an established body of law but also within the essential definition of America. Opposition to gay marriage is most commonly rooted in tradition, religious tradition in particular. But the ideas that all men are created equal and have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness are the traditions that define our nation, and by basing its decision on those premises the court did gay rights, and American ideals, a huge service.

As to what the vanguards of our judicial system have been upto, this CNN-IBN article makes some timely revelations :P

I spent the last two hours reading about this remarkable man who is confronting the worst form of iniquity in our country currently. Thanks to a recent post on a friend's blog, I learned about Dr. Binayak Sen, a public health specialist of international repute and the national vice-president of the People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) , Chhattisgarh. Dr. Sen was arrested in May 2007 for alleged links with Maoist groups under the CSPSA and UAPA provisions, that allow for arbitrary detention denying the right to appeal. Dr. Sen had been actively involved in criticizing the unlawful encounter killings of several adivasis in the state through government controlled civil militia under the pretext of eliminating Naxal activities. The following statement was issued by Dr. Sen a few months before his arrest:

we are seeing all over India - and as part of that in the state of Chhattisgarh as well - a concerted programme to expropriate from the poorest people in the Indian nation, their access to essentials, common property resources and to natural resources including land and water... The campaign called the Salwa Judoom in Chhattisgarh is a part of this process in which hundreds of villages have been denuded of the people living in them and hundreds of people - men and women - have been killed. Government-armed vigilantes have been deployed and the people who have been protesting against such moves and trying to bring before the world the reality of these campaigns - human rights workers like myself - have also been targeted through state action against them. At the present moment the workers of the Chhattisgarh PUCL (People's Union for Civil Liberties) the Chhattisgarh branch, of which I am General Secretary, have particularly become the target of such state action; and I, along with several of my colleagues, are being targeted by the Chhattisgarh state in the form of punitive action, illegal imprisonment. And all these measures are being taken especially under the aegis of the Chhattisgarh Public Security Act.

According to online sources, this man has been kept in solitary confinement for the past eleven months while no conclusive evidence has been found to substantiate his alleged Maoist links. It is unfortunate that a man who has devoted himself to serve the public sphere finds himself the victim of an unlawful state, a corrupt police and an impotent judiciary. The case for Dr. Sen has found support from eminent personalities like Noam Chomsky, Amartya Sen, Ramachandra Guha, Arundhati Roy, filmmaker Shyam Benegal and the Magsasay award winning journalist P. Sainath. About a month ago, the Global Health Council announced that Dr. Sen had been selected to receive the most prestigious international honour in Global Health and Human Rights, the Jonathon Mann award. "The Mann Award is presented annually at the Global Health Councils international conference to "a practitioner who makes significant contributions toward practical work in the field and in difficult circumstances; highlights the linkage of health with human rights; works predominantly in developing countries and with marginalized people; and demonstrates serious and long-term commitment". Less than a week ago, twenty two Nobel laureates from around the world wrote India's President, Prime Minister and the Chhattisgarh state authorities to release Dr. Sen.

I strongly urge that you read about this man and perhaps think of casting a vote on this online petition form. It isn't much to be proud about but the least we can hope is that our armchair activism reaches some considerate ear that has the ability to restore a man his right to dignity and liberty.

Divorce rates and the indian dream

Amit Varma, in his recent post, articulates on how modernization and technology have bridged the gap between the sexes in recent times. Interestingly, he titles his post 'We Should Celebrate Rising Divorce Rates' and I would imagine he does that with a tongue in his cheek. Though his thesis seems convincing on first read, some clear counterexamples came to my mind in the very beginning. One is that of Kerala, where the empowerment of women has not really been fostered by the advent of modern technology. The matrilineal system is known to have existed in the state since ages. The second counterexample is that of an Islamic country like Saudi Arabia, where, in spite of technological sustenance, the condition of women in society remains decadent thanks to the preponderance of the Shariah laws.

Mr. Varma is perhaps correct in his main thesis- that increasing divorce rates in a country like India is definitely indicative of women empowerment. But I feel he is simplifying the causal connections associated with the empowerment of women in society. For a portrait of 19th and early 20th century British society, I'd recommend a reading of Virginia Woolf's AROO, an essay that I briefly talked about in an earlier post. That said, the quality of life that women in Kerala enjoy (literacy rate of 97% against the national average of 55%; sex ratio of 1.06 as opposed to the national avergae of 0.93; highest and lowest life expectancy and infant mortality rates in India) is something that I find immensely surprising and at the same time ennobling. One finds writers like Amartya Sen (in The Argumentative Indian and Development as Freedom) and Shashi Tharoor (in his India:From Midnight to the Millenium and the more recent The Elephant, the tiger and the cellphone, a collection of essays on India) raving about the Kerala miracle. Sen, tries to articulate some reasons for these successes but I still feel there remain lessons to be learned - for Mr. Varma and the rest of us too.

anecdote

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, perhaps the greatest astrophysicist of the twentieth century, loved to tell the story of a visit to Princeton in the mid 1980s, where he was feted in honor of his recent Nobel Prize. At the dinner, he found himself seated next to an earnest young man. As physicists often do to make conversation, he asked his dinner companion, "What are you working on these days?" The reply was, "I work on string theory, which is the most important advance in physics in the twentieth century." The young string theorist went on to advise Chandra to drop what he was doing and switch to string theory or risk becoming as obsolete as those in the 1920s who did not immediately take up quantum theory.

"Young man," Chandra replied, "I knew Werner Heisenberg. I can promise you that Heisenberg would never have been so rude as to tell someone to stop what they were doing and work on quantum theory. And he certainly would not have been so disrespectful as to tell someone who got his PhD fifty years ago that he was about to become obsolete."

- From "The trouble with physics" by Lee Smolin

Vanity and vada pav

Some interesting historical comments about Mumbai along with the washing of Thackeray's (or should I say Thakre) dirty linen in true editorial fashion in this HT article. The other hilarious piece of news that I heard recently was the possibility of the ubiquitous vada pav being patented by Shiv Sena as an exclusively Marathi recipe. They want to rechristen it to Shiv vada pav. Other repercussions notwithstanding, my primary concern is the collateral damage it will cause to my father's love for the mumbai ispecial delicacy. Vada pav might lose one of its more loyal connoisseurs to the brickbats of marathi chauvinism. Happily touring the US right now, my father doesn't know what's in store for him when he steps out of Sahar, oops....Chattrapathi Shivaji International airport.