I went to hear Manil Suri, a mathematics professor at the University of Baltimore, and the author of The Age Of Shiva and The Death Of Vishnu, speak at the USIS auditorium earlier this week. The basic aim of his lecture was to reduce his audience's anxieties towards maths. At the outset, this phobia of math isn't too much of an Indian phenomenon. It's an issue the west may be facing more acutely. However, it was still an engaging talk.
He started off by explaining Fourier Analysis. On a basic level Fourier Analysis is the breaking down of complex wave patterns into simpler wave forms, called "basic functions". He likened this process to "deconstruction," a word that was in vogue a few decades ago amongst philosophers and critics. For example, the sound of an orchestra, can be broken down into the wave forms of the component instrument sounds. Colour can be broken down into light waves of red, green, and blue. He then took a leap into the world of folktales. He spoke about a Russian scholar who studied over 100 Russian folktales in the first quarter of the 2oth century, and broke them down into 30 "basic functions." There's a website where you can ask the computer to put some of the 31 parts together, and a completely new story is written by a software program. The beauty of basic functions is that they can then be re-assembled to make a new new form. Imagine applying this concept to Bollywood films, Suri joked. That would be a bit boring wouldn't it? He did admit that modern fiction couldn't be analyzed so easily.
Another interesting concept he spoke about was the process of counting. What is counting? It's merely the assignment of a series of number to a series of objects. When you count, you are bringing various completely different forms to the common platform of numbers.
He's on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBS_cNHvnBE. He's presenting a lecture called Taming Infinity. I still need to watch it myself...
No comments:
Post a Comment