At the invitation of the Minister of Education of Vietnam, I went to Hanoi for a week to talk at a workshop of Chancelors and Vice Chancellors of Vietnameese Colleges and Universities.
Of the 200 people at the conference (including six Vietnamese and four foreign speakers), I was really the only one that was a working researcher, and I bring a different perspective. I also don’t have a “canned” presentation. I described the California three tier University system and compared it (and students) to the higher education system in India. I was useful to me to organize my thoughts. The advantages of each are clearer to me now.
Talking with the administrators about education in Vietnam was exhilarating, but I am not going to go into that now. Instead I am going to post some pictures from walks around back streets (when others thought I was listening to all the other speakers). Hanoi is fascinating. My strongest memory was a dinner the Rector of Higher Education took me to in a restaurant overlooking a lake in the old French Quarter of Hanoi. I and two Vietnamese and two Japanese administrators talked and joked and ate while a woman hauntingly sang to the counterpoint of a one-string instrument whose pitch was changed by pressuring a vertical stick (literally a stick) that tensioned the string. Towards the end of the evening they played a version that I will swear was “The Red River Valley” (David Pederson joked that this could be a song from the cold war days when the Red River Valley would be the Mekong Delta and not a river in Texas),
One last thing and then you come to the pictures. I have been out of town for six weeks (The seminar in Pondicherry and the workshop in Hanoi), and that is why I haven’t put up new postings. I am leaving in a few days for a ten days back in Tamil Nadu.
Ramanujam (the Indian Mathematician) was born in Tamil Nadu. He is a legend in India (and I think the sole reason people think India has a great history of mathematicians).
For those who don’t know who he is, Ramanujam is the the most romantic figure in the history of science. He was clerking in a India and developing a line of mathematics research on his own. He sent some results to G.H. Hardy at Oxford. Hardy and Littlewood were mathematic’s most respected collaborators of the time. To give a perspective, I get several papers a year from people who claim breakthrough results –if only someone will listen to them –so they say. The papers I get are equivalent to someone saying they have invented a perpetual motion machine. Anyway Hardy saw something in Ramanujam’s writings, but these were written in idiosyncratic notation and unconventional language and style. He brought the papers to Littlewood, and the two spent days deciphering the writing. The work, in fact, was genius (I don’t use that word lightly). They brought Ramanujam to Oxford where the three made brilliant discoveries. But Ramanujam died within a year (or two-I don’t remember) of tuberculosis in the cold of London. (Tamil Nadu is in the tropical south of India).
Everyone in mathematics (and probably everyone in science) knows the story. Consequently the State University of Tamil Nadu (Anna University) and IIT Madras both have commemorative lecture series on that day, 22 December. Both have invited me to be their speaker. They are located near each other in Chennai on the other side of the subcontinent from Mangalore. They have gotten together and arranged a shuttle scheme for me to talk at one in the morning and at the other in the afternoon. I then fly south to give an invited lecture at an Indian Math Society regional meeting. My question is this. They all offered to pay my air fare, Can I give all three of them copies of the invoice, then charge the Fulbright administration, and my grant and also take it off my taxes? This is just like Max Bialystock (played by Zero Mostel), soliciting 700% of the necessary funds to produce the sure-thing failure of a play, “Spring Time For Hitler”, in “The Producers”—only I don’t have to get rejected attempting to seduce, and then swindle, ugly women.
