An attitude called

Applied mathematics; here is my sentence(s) of the day!

Applied mathematics is not a subject classification. It is an attitude!

Tributes to Raja Rao – V!

R Parthasarathy pays his in the Hindu:

“The style of a man . . . ,” he had written, “the way he weaves word against word . . . makes a comma here, puts a dash there: all are signs of the inner movement, . . . the nature of his thought.”

No Pakistan in Indian music!

Ram Guha reviews The lost world of Hindustani music. Books on music that are enjoyable are hard to come by — the only two I know of are Raga-n-Josh of Sheila Dhar and Great masters of Carnatic music by Indira Menon. I need to check if this book by Kumar Mukherji book can join the elite club!

Individual DNA strands!

Head over to Living the Scientific Life to take a look at!

Rejection and authors!

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

– P D James, Original Sin

Did you say unorthodox?

Maud Newton in unorthodox writing straegies says:

The late Charles Willeford (Miami Blues) on the secret to writing:

Never allow yourself to take a leak in the morning until you’ve written a page. That way you’re guaranteed a page a day, and at the end of a year you have a novel.

Does this strategy work for scientific writing too? Just wondering

Didn’t I tell ya?

There is a perfection in mess, and, a table that looks messy does not necessarily mean ill-organised. Now, those of you who have seen my work table and my room would  understand how organised I have always been, I guess

A differential geometry primer!

Tangents, normals, curvatures, grad, curl, Laplacian… Here is a nice primer on differential geometry published in the Reviews of Modern Physics. On the way, you might learn a bit of soft condensed matter too. According to the abstract, the necessary pre-requisite is just vector calculus:

This article presents an overview of the differential geometry of curves and surfaces using examples from soft matter as illustrations. The presentation requires a background only in vector calculus and is otherwise self-contained.

Here is a link to the preprint at arXiv. Nice and extremely readable article!

Ravi Dayal: tribute from Seminar!

Here is In memoriam: Ravi Dayal from tha July issue of Seminar.

Love of math and God!

So it was a love of math that preserved Archimedes’ work for the first thousand years — and a love of God that carried it to the present.

So ends an article about Archimedes Palimsest at NPR. It even has some details about the multispectral imaging and X-ray fluourescence imaging used to uncover the hidden text. Take a look!