Wednesday, January 30, 2008

From the interweb tubes ...


Recently, Yale made available some of its courses online. All of them with videos. The physics section has just one introductory course, taught by Prof. Ramamurti Shankar.

The philosophy section also has just one course; it's from Prof. Shelly Kagan. Can you guess its title?

Death!

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Over at the Women and Math blog, Sujatha Ramdorai, winner of the Ramanujan Prize in 2006, describes her life as a mathematician in India (while there, check out their statistics page; link via Kuffir at BlogBharti):

I got married before I graduated and then continued to do my Master’s degree in mathematics, by correspondence. I was still unaware that a research career in mathematics was possible, the level of information dissemination was quite abysmal then even in cities! We moved to Bombay and here a few people vaguely mentioned `Tata Institute of fundamental Research’, however knowing little beyond the name! It was a sheer stroke of luck that I chanced upon the advertisement of TIFR calling for admissions to the Ph.D degree… I did my Ph.D there under the supervision of Professor Parimala Raman and have continued to work there after my Ph.D.

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Dhi and his wife are celebrating the news about their alma mater: the Indian School of Business stands at No. 20 in the Financial Times ranking of global business schools. Interestingly, ISB's partner (and mentor?) in the US, Northwestern's Kellogg, is ranked lower, at 24!

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In this post by Feanor about an eccentric professor at IISc (no, there's no excerpt, you will have to click through to find out more about him), there's this thing at the end, listed under "References":

The Gaza Strip was what we called the section of road between the Central Library and the Physics department, which used to be carpet bombed by crows coming in every evening to roost in the lush trees surrounding the area. It was said that if a crow shat on one's head, one was condemned to do a PhD at IISc. I got hit only once - on the shoulder - so I escaped the academic horror of a doctorate from that institution.

1 Comments:

  1. FĂ«anor said...

    hiya: thanks for the backlink to my post! i'm pleased to report that we had other eccentrics at IISc, on whom i'll no doubt find time to heap calumny in due time :-)