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From infinity to zero
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As elementary students get set on the keyboard for the World Math Day, the prognosis for Mathematics remains scary. Serish Nanisettisums up the problem
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Photo: Satish. H
Maths remains a puzzle The lure of numbers has come down sharply
Purnamadah Purnamidam Purnatpurnamudachyate.
Purnasya Purnamadaya Purnamevavashisyate.
(Subtracting infinity from infinity is still infinity).
Yajurveda, Shanti Mantra, Chapter 40
For a civilisation that could imagine the abstraction of Zero and flirt with infinity and bring alive a Srinivasa Ramanujan who saw dancing numbers, the state of mathematics and its research is in a flux.
As millions of children get ready to crack about 50 million maths problems as part of the World Math Day, all is not well with the mother of all sciences. Inside the PG College of Science and Mathematics, Saifabad, the ground floor of the new building is a bustle of activity with young men and women in white overcoats moving about and pungent chemical odours: This is the Chemistry department. The first floor is the Maths department. It is locked. Outside, three young men walking with books and a large clipboard have the explanation: “We have prep holidays.”
Suryam from Mahboobnagar, Suresh from Karimnagar and Raju from Warangal are studying B. Sc maths for the simple reason that they got admission here. Given a choice they would prefer a computer course any day. “There are more opportunities if we do a computer course,” they chime in Telugu.
Y. Rameshwar, who teaches applied maths at the college calls it the computer/software problem. “The intake of the students has not declined but the aspirants are fewer. Earlier, more than 15,000 students used to write the entrance. This year it was just 4000 students. It is not a local problem but a global one,” he says about students getting more interested in the lucrative computer courses or other streams where landing jobs is easier are more paying.
Prof K. Narasimha Reddy, HOD at the Osmania University is sure that the interest in Maths hasn’t declined. “There is lot of research happening though it might not be very obvious. But the majority of students now have Bill Gates as the idol and are not really bothered about pure sciences,” he says.
“Research in pure mathematics is going on at a faster pace thanks to computers, but it is not very obvious. We create the boundaries and rules and applied maths and sciences build around it. All the engineering or biomechanical or other sciences take off from here,” says Syeda Latifunnisa, HOD of College of Science and Maths at Masab Tank. If the bobbing heads in the classrooms 104, 103 in the college are more girls then boys, and two of the teachers wear scarves, then the other equation is that more students are from vernacular schools. “Communication and language skills are a big drawback,” agree Narasimha Reddy and Y. Rameshwar. “Most of the students coming here are from rural areas. Even the teachers and researchers have done their education in the regional languages and they find it difficult to push the frontiers of communication,” says Rameshwar.
Ironically, Pi or World Math Day should have been celebrated on 3/14 but is being marked on 3/5. Perhaps that’s another secret like the boring taxi number 1729 that Prof G. H. Hardy thought, while S. Ramanujan proved it to be the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
Only perhaps.
For a country that produced Aryabhatta who first used the notion of infinitesimals in 499 AD and a Bhaskara in the 12th century AD who developed a derivative representing infinitesimal change, the lure of billions and billions to be made from binary calculations is proving to be infinite.
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