Freeman Dyson passed away

Obituary in NYTimes.
Some videos of his contributions to physics and the last one about Fermi indicates a humble person but he was always quite independent while admiring others.

https://youtu.be/i3RcN5UGwgI Linking the ideas of Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga

https://youtu.be/pToteaNcIdk Richard Feynman and his work

https://youtu.be/hV41QEKiMlM fermi’s rejection of our work.
And one more on Richard Feynman ‘Meeting Feynman with .....’

M.S.Raghunanthan on Modi dispensation

https://youtu.be/vOkpT44y1_U

An old virus in Delhi

Mosque set on fire as violent protests continue across New Delhi 

Old news

1966 anti-cow slaughter agitation “ M. N. Srinivas commented that the episode solidly convinced him that the Hindus of North India had not evolved into modern people” but I have seen similar attitudes in South India too.
Tradition in modern India by J.Heesterman from 1963.

About the new Coronavirus Covid-19

You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus from The Atlantic, a fairly comprehensive article.
Symptomless cases raise coronavirus control fears from SciDev.net

Sangeeta Sudha

English translations of Carnatic lyrics

100 most spoken languages in the world

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/100-most-spoken-languages/

An article on the brain

Take your brain for a walk

Vikram Chandra on Panini

Pāṇini: Catching the Ocean in a Cow’s Hoofprint Long read and worth several reads.

Emmy Noether

A short and comprehensive article on her influence.
Our introduction to modern mathematics was through Van der Waerden’s book ‘Modern Algebra’ which stayed that it was in part based on lectures by Emil Artin and army Noether. Do her name was familiar from the beginning. Here he describes the sources of his boo in which her father’s name is also mentioned. I remember when Emil Artin died in 1962, Fr. Racine probably had no one to share his grief. He came to my room in Loyola College hostel to tell me of the sad news. Now Facebook has changed that I think. We can share our emotion with distant people. On the sources of my book Modern Algebra 

Mistakes in mathematics

I probably did a Stallings. I spent the whole of last night ‘proving’ some thing which bothered me off and on for forty years. When the mind is calmer, mistakes will emerge but not in the current state. As Stallings said in  ‘How not to prove the Poincaré conjecture’ some excitement and blindness takes over: “I was unable to find flaws in my ‘proof’ for quite a while, even though the error is very obvious. It was a psychological problem, a blindness, an excitement, an inhibition of reasoning by an underlying fear of being wrong. Techniques leading to the abandonment of such inhibitions should be cultivated by every honest mathematician.” May be the body needs rest too. In any case I got some training from Stallings writing his Tata Notes which I wrote in 1967 adding many mistakes of mine to his. He describes the genesis of those Noted towards the end here in Remambering John Stallings
“Early in my career, when I was starting to teach at Princeton, I got to give some seminar talks on my work on PL manifolds, involving the Engulfing Theorem and high-dimensional Poincaré Conjecture. I did not do a good job of this; there were many details, such as general position, which I did not really know how to do; the typical proof was just by hand-waving. I do recall “great” topologists in the audience, such as Milnor. And I think I called it off eventually, finally getting the proofs of some details in my Tata notes of 1967 or so.”

A bit about Indian educational system

Gautam Menon from three years ago. For some reason I could not share the post. So, I copied and pasted. I saw while I was wondering why many in India including strong leftists who recommend Naxalism for others try to send their children and grand children abroad at considerable expense. This may explain part of the background. Here is the old post:

Some of you may remember my difficulties with the 'summer student' I wrote about a few weeks ago. The one who couldn't plot a graph, not even of y = x. I wish I could report that the situation had miraculously improved. Alas, after almost daily meetings in which we've tried to make some progress on these matters as well as marginally more advanced material, I continue to be mystified as to how she could have qualified for *any* degree in physics in the first place.

The situation is coming to a head now that her term here is drawing to an end and she must write a project report for her university. Apparently, the rule is that the report must be not less than 40 pages in length!  It doesn't matter what is in the report, really, provided it is of the appropriate length.

I honestly don't see what I could have done differently. If we were not going over really elementary material that she should have know from school, even, I might have ensured that she did something that might have qualified to be put into a report. Right now, the report can only be an undigested mishmash of copied material from a few chapters of a book that I suggested she read. I am sure that she will achieve a high grade for doing precisely that, just as I'm sure my signature will be required at some place in the report, to sign off on the statement that she did something while she was here.

I'm deeply embarrassed by this charade but, as I said, I don't see anything that I could have done differently. Should I refuse to sign the report? But what good would that do? If the whole system is so messed up that it puts out students who go through bachelors and masters degrees in science without gaining the slightest idea of what science is, gives them high marks and ranks in university exams, even gives them a completely inflated estimate of their own abilities, it seems unfair to penalize a particular student for what is a far more deep-rooted and systemic problem. Perhaps I could write to the head of the department who replied to me following my specific question in this regard, that this was a good student, interested in pursuing research and that she was being specifically recommended? Would I be able to get my point across? What good would it do?  Should I at least suggest that asking a student to prepare a 40-page report for a 6 week project is a silly thing to do, that even a 5 or 10 page report on something new that was learnt would be sufficient, if sincerely done?

(At least the student has learnt to plot simple functions which, all said and done, is a tentative first step towards something, although I'm not sure what.)

You are all welcome to weigh in - any advice is welcome.