Reflections

Journalists are under threat in today’s India. There is no doubt that the present political dispensation is unlikely to show mercy to dissent and being a very well organized  political force are willing to play a long ideological game in order to suppress dissent. This is nothing unusual. Cadre based political formations are always good at this. Our communist friends were so good at this that in the then red fortress of West Bengal everybody was a communist if they were to survive particularly in government institutions. Their front organisations had massive membership numbers and it was difficult to find a dissenting voice. The present right wing dispensation has a similar approach. They are handicapped because their dominance in the political spectrum in India is not as pronounced as the Communists had in West Bengal, but they are using the usual mix of strong arm tactics as well as carrots to impose their worldview on the Indian public. Journalists are particularly at ri...

This post is reblogged from Brain Pickings : available here Beautiful Brain: The Stunning Drawings of Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramón y Cajal “A graphic representation of the object observed guarantees the exactness of the observation itself.” BY MARIA POPOVA Oliver Sacks insisted that  “ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing,”  which he considered “a special, indispensable form” of talking to himself.  Unusual creature though he was, the beloved neurologist was not the only scientist who turned to other forms of creative expression as a clarifying force for scientific inquiry. The Spanish histologist, onetime bodybuilder, selfie pioneer, and Nobel laureate  Santiago Ramón y Cajal  (May 1, 1852–October 17, 1934), widely considered the founding father of modern neuroscience, used drawing the way Dr. Sacks used writing — as a vital way of thinking out loud, of giving form to ideas, of making arguments and fleshing out...

Sitala Mata: the Goddess of Smallpox  The history of medicine in India has always interested me. Not that I have ever put in any sustained study of the subject, but I do always look up any article that comes to my notice. Someday, when I have more time, I am going to study this more seriously (and travel more widely, write a book on Himalayan wildflowers, take superb bird pictures and grow vegetables among many other things). However in my studies, such as they are, it is apparent that the History Department of the University of Burdwan appears to be in the forefront of such research. I recently read an article written by the head of the Department, Dr Arabinda Samanta. This paper examined the prevention of smallpox in Bengal in the nineteenth century and it contained some information that really made me sit up. I was always under the impression that the prevention of smallpox dated from Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination. I knew, of course that there were some de...

Bakshali Numericals  ( Source: Wikipedia)  The greatest mathematical discovery of all time was undoubtedly the invention of Zero. This allowed mathematicians and common people to make calculations easily and conveniently, calculations that were otherwise so complex that even very intelligent people floundered in making them. As Bailey and Borwein put it in a major article published in 2011, it was a discovery that eluded the greatest minds of the Western civilizations, mathematicians of the caliber of Archimedes, and unsurprisingly was resisted fiercely by Western mathematicians when they were first introduced to it by the Arabs and even today is often ascribed to sources other than the right one. As the French historian Georges Ifrah describes it ““Now that we can stand back from the story, the birth of our modern number-system seems a colossal event in the history of humanity, as momentous as the mastery of fire, the development of agriculture, or the invention of ...

Andre Bloch  ‘In the North Eastern corner of France lies Besancon. It is near the border with Switzerland and was an important centre for watch making: the industry was wiped out in a matter of years by competition from Japan. Be that as it may, it is also the birthplace of one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the early twentieth century, who was also a multiple murderer and a madman. Andre Bloch (not to be confused by the composer with the same name) was one of the three sons of a Alsatian Jewish watchmaker, one of the many who made Besancon a major center of the watch trade. He was born on the 20 th November 1893 and his younger brother Georges was born less than a year later. Both the brothers were in the same class at the Lycee (secondary school) in Besancon. Both the brothers had considerable mathematical talents and their mathematics teacher Professor Carrus, who taught them for two years ( 1908-9) thought that they should compete to enter the Ecole Polyt...