JOST A MON

The idle ramblings of a Jack of some trades, Master of none

Aug 13, 2014

Fields

Despite my stated intentions, I never did progress on my profiles of top-class women mathematicians ahead of the latest Fields Medals. The announcement has come and Maryam Mirzakhani has become the first woman to win this accolade.

As an 8-year-old, Maryam Mirzakhani used to tell herself stories about the exploits of a remarkable girl. Every night at bedtime, her heroine would become mayor, travel the world or fulfill some other grand destiny. 1

Mirzakhani as a child (via Quanta magazine)


In 2010, I'd written that desis and women had another four years to go for their next pop at the award. It turns out Manjul Bhargava has also won, and although he's Canadian/American, I'm sure desis will be quite pleased to claim him as one of our own.



Reference

 1. A tenacious explorer of abstract surfaces, by Erica Klarreich, Quanta Magazine, August 12, 2014.

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Dec 8, 2010

Wine Snobs Iranian Style

The only Iranian nationals allowed to consume alcohol are those of Armenian origin, the idea being that they are Christians and so not subject to Islamic law. So Armenians are the major purveyors of spirits and wines to the rest of their unfortunate compatriots. Each Muslim family will have its own Armenian supplier, and the best ones are treasured above their price in rubies. As one expects.

But Iranians also like the idea of making wine at home (as do most Arabs) - not surprising, considering they claim to be one of the first wine-making nations (remember Shiraz?) And so, they like to compete with each other, going so far as to hold tasting sessions that are as cut-throat as anything in France. There are difficulties - no readily available bottles to store the wine in, or stemware to drink from. So they make do with styrofoam cups and plastic bottles. But every little advantage helps to assert one's superiority, as Nahal Tajadod reveals in her exasperated-and-funny memoir Tehran, Lipstick and Loopholes.
A French-speaking cousin of mine, who has pronounced herself a wine connoisseur, always starts by asking for a large wine glass with a stem. She pours wine into it, commenting on the colour in the process, then swirls the glass slowly in her hand, puts her redesigned nose into it, moistens her gums, keeps the wine in her mouth for a moment with half-closed eyes, and eventually - watched in fascination by everyone else - delivers her peremptory and definitive opinion. Every time she goes to Paris she makes a point of learning by heart the vintage and price of a few famous wines so she can bewitch her entourage (and these are people who serve wine in Coke bottles) by quoting endless lists of enchanting mythical names such as Romanée-Conti 1929 or Mouton-Rothschild 1982, oh, if you only knew...

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Sep 16, 2010

Another Season of Anomie

In the Soviet Union of the 1970s and early 1980s, there was feeling of utter listlessness and apathy amongst the youth. The authoritarian system seemed well-entrenched, decaying yet tenacious. In those years, the quality of art and literature out of the Russian empire dropped precipitously. Other than a lone Solzhenitsyn, it appeared that there was little creativity about. Even the music was derivative and tired. People retreated more and more into themselves.

Hooman Majd, in his The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran, published a little before the electoral events of last year, described a similar apathy amongst the youth of Iran. As long as they could practise their freedoms in the privacy of their homes, they didn't want to rock the boat, demand external liberties, engage in street protests. On the other side, the ruling cliques and their foot-soldiers became a bit more lax in punishing violations of the decency codes. A mutual detente, for all intents and purposes eternal, descended upon the land. There would be no immediate revolt, quoth Mr Majd.

It is a different matter that he was very shortly thereafter proven wrong in this assessment (in fact, he has quickly come up with a sequel - which I haven't read yet - which probably updates his argument).

But before you think to yourself that such ennui only descends upon totalitarian regimes, I'll urge you to read the absolutely superb Berlin Blues by Sven Regener. It is set in the West Berlin of the 1980s, in the weeks leading up to the fall of the Wall. West Berlin, you may recall, was an outpost of freedom surrounded on all sides by the Communist East, an embrace that caused many residents to feel an unconscious suffocation. Not our protagonist, though, who has turned thirty (or will shortly do so), and who expects nothing more from life than to continue to be a bartender, to read books, and to live life without too many expectations. In this, he is no different from his large circle of friends and acquaintances, all of whom stagger through their daily lives with all the insight of a dormouse. This is a funny and affectionate portrayal of a time of stagnation in the West shortly before 1989 when the collapse of Communism suddenly revitalised the people of Europe.

I was far too young in the 70s to experience any of this soul-sucking anomie; in the 80s, it was all high hair and Michael Jackson. Reading about the lives of people only a few years older than I am now brings fresh insight into events that shaped their characters. Sadly it appears that both freedom and the lack of it serve eventually to stifle the lives of the bright and sparky.

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Aug 29, 2010

A Dulcimer, Hammered

After bringing a rousing tune on the Santur and Daff to a close, Peyman Heydarian announced that he and his percussionist had just played a Kurdish wedding song.

"It's very popular in Tehran," he said. "It's about a girl who doesn't want to get married."

"The Tehranis don't understand the lyrics," he added. "Which is probably why it's so popular. The Kurds know what it means, and that probably explains why the Kurds don't sing it much."

Peyman Heydarian is a man with a mission - to restore the glorious santur to its rightful place in the firmament of Persian music. I suspect it is a bit of an upward struggle - the aficionados die out and the young prefer modern music, especially the sugary synth promoted by the Iranian diaspora in Los Angeles and received right back in the homeland via satellite dishes. He has been researching the scales of this ancient instrument for years, and recently recovered a style that had disappeared from the oeuvre some time in the last couple of centuries.

The santur has a wide footprint, of course. It has become an intimate part of Hindustani classical music, most notably under Pandit Shivkumar Sharma. In the early Middle Ages, it spread into China. In Europe, where, under Arab musical influence, it became known as the hammered dulcimer, and remained part of the music scene for centuries.
Classical Persian music is based on a modal system of 7 main modes and 5 derivative modes which are collectively called Dastgah: Shur, Abu'Ata, Bayat-e-Tork, Afshari, Dashti, Homayun, Bayat-e-Esfehan, Segah, Chahargah, Mahur, Rast Panjgah, and Nava. Our programme consists of pieces in Shur, Mahur and Bayat-e-Esfehan and an abandoned mode, 'Maqam Saba.' (from the programme notes.)
At a concert I attended a few weeks ago (with Rochelle), Peyman and his percussionist Emad Rajabalipour performed rollicking pieces from the Persian and Kurdish classical tradition. Then they introduced the lovely Vicky Anastasiou who sang a Kurdish song with rivetting facility. Considering she is Greek, has no knowledge of Kurdish, and had only learnt the song in the past couple of days, it was an incredible performance.

Peyman is a multi-instrumentalist, and often participates in jamming sessions and concerts with like-minded musicians in the SOAS Rebetiko band. He is expert at the tar (Persian lute), the barbat (or the ud), and the piano and the daff. What's more, he has created innovative tuning system to be able to play the Celtic, Turkish, Greek, and early European repertoire. And in the second half of his concert, he invited musicians and singers from the audience to join him in making a jolly evening of it all.

There are more concerts coming up so I'll urge you to check to go check it out.

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Aug 10, 2010

Stack Overflow: Illegal Memory Access

What do you think of this sentence?
Ms. Ebadi is hardly afraid of jail, having spent time there, but she probably understands that what the West wants Muslim so-called moderates to say and to promote is merely a vision of a secular culture imported from the West, a vision that doesn't carry much weight with a people that is moving, albeit very slowly, to a democracy that is self-defined and that may not be recognizable to Westerners, accustomed to defining democracy as either liberal or not a democracy at all.
This is from Hooman Majd's rather good The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran.

Or how about this?
Although anonymity excuses the Persian from ta'arouf, and public speaking is the antithesis of anonymous behaviour, Ahmad Khatami and others who make such speeches are speaking on behalf of the nation (or the clerical establishment) and against another nation, and the collective 'we' makes them impersonal outbursts that some Iranian politicians today, with a sense of power that Shias haven't felt in centuries, believe appeal to the masses of their supporters who are more accustomed to being the downtrodden and oppressed majority of society than a people that can strike back against any injustice.
The book's full of sentences like this. Is it just me, or does Mr Majd expect a deep recursion stack in the brains of all his readers?

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Aug 3, 2010

Fielders To Watch?

To be invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians is a great honour, and to be forty years of age or younger is doubly impressive, for it means that you might be very well in with a chance to win the Fields Medal. I thought I might scan through the list of speakers at the ICM 2010 site and see who the young guns are. In particular, I thought I'd focus on the women.

Now, at the absolute top rank of mathematics, there have been historically very few women. Think about this: between the first ICM and the first address by a woman, almost 30 years passed. Then another 60-odd years went by until Karen Uhlenbeck spoke at ICM 1990.

Fortunately, though, this is all changing. And so it is heartening indeed to see women's names pop up in this list. Even more wondrously, these young scientists are not restricted to the traditional powerhouses of mathematics - Russia, France, USA. You'll find Iranians and Spaniards and Taiwanese as well.

So here goes.

Maryam Mirzakhani: this mathematician from Iran, now based in the USA, is doubly honoured - she addresses a session in Topology as well as Dynamical Systems. Like several previous winners of the Fields Medal, she was very successful in her youth at the International Mathematics Olympiad. More recently, she was awarded the Blumenthal Award (2009), which is awarded quadrennially, and is for the best PhD thesis published in preceding four years. Her work - among others - is in the geometric structures and their deformations in all sorts of spaces, and she brings in an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems in the field, by using insights from combinatorics and mathematical physics.

Irit Dinur: is a theoretical computer scientist from Israel, where she has been working on problems in proof theory - how to establish formally that a proof is correct? In particular, by making random inspections of a formally written-out proof, is it possible to verify it? This is a deep problem in theoretical computer science, with a fundamental result (that it is, indeed, possible) established in 1992. She was able to establish a much simpler and radically new proof of this theorem in 2005, which has resulted in fresh pastures for investigation. As we know, it's not enough to solve a problem - what's better is to do so in such a way that a whole new domain of research opens up, with exciting new possibilities. Dinur has done this with aplomb. And so there's some gossip that she might win the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize (which is also awarded quadrennially at an ICM) for the applications of mathematics in the information sciences.

Sophie Morel: is from France, and her PhD thesis was an important development in the Langlands Program, solving a problem that had remained open for over twenty years. (You may recall that Laurent Lafforgue won the Fields Medal in 2002 for his contributions in this area.) This is cutting-edge work at the intersection of number theory and algebraic geometry. She was made a full professor of mathematics at Harvard last year, a notably rare and distinguished achievement made especially so when you realise that she's the first woman to be tenured in mathematics at that university! To boot, she is a skilled polyglot, conversant in French, English, Russian, German, Spanish, and now learning Korean.

Chiu-Chu Liu: is a mathematical physicist from Taiwan. She, again, is a multidisciplinarian, combining techniques from topology, differential geometry, and algebraic geometry to answer open problems in theoretical physics. In particular, her work in establishing the Marino-Vafa conjecture has been well-recognised. This has deep ramifications in string theory.

Anna Erschler: is a Russian mathematician based in France. Along with Mirzakhani, she too has two addresses at the ICM (Probability and Geometry). Her work is at the conjunction of probability and group theory.

Isabel Fernández: is a Spanish professor of mathematics at the University of Seville, and has received much attention in her native country for being the first ever Spanish woman to be invited to an ICM. Her work has been termed, loosely, soap-bubble geometry, because she investigates the geometric properties of curved objects. It is at once a classical field in mathematics, but equally cutting-edge, combining results from differential equations, complex analysis and variational calculus. Interestingly, her work has found immediate practical application in architecture, notably at the Olympic stadium in Munich, where surfaces she studied have been found to be light-weight, use little by way of materials, and are notably resilient. And, having solved one of the open major problems in the field - minimal surfaces in homogeneous spaces - the invitation to the ICM celebrates her achievement (to be sure, with her colleague Paul Mira).

Catharina Stroppel: is a German mathematician, winner of the 2007 Whitehead prize for her work in representation theory and its applications to low-dimensional topology.

Marianna Csörnyei: is Hungarian, another Whitehead prizewinner (2002), and works in geometric measure theory. "Central to her work is the analysis of viable definitions of ‘negligible’ in the context of infinite-dimensional situations, with a view to applications in non-linear geometric functional analysis. Technically difficult, the judges described her work as characterised by the ‘startling nature of many of her results’. A particularly ‘spectacular achievement’ highlighted was her proof that the three main notions of ‘negligibility’ coincide, and her revelation of delicate phenomena in the theory of Lipschitz quotients even in the finite dimensional case." (from here)

Nalini Anantharaman: is French; her work is in mathematical physics, and she attempts to answer questions about the phenomenon of dispersion: "A wave propagates in a closed cavity. It will bounce off the walls. I'm trying to understand how it will dissolve: will it remain compartmentalized, contained in a portion of the cavity or will it be dispersed throughout the cavity?" (from here) One of her major contributions is in quantum chaos, where she established some results supporting the Quantum Unique Ergodicity Conjecture.

Katrin Wendland: is German; her work is in mathematical physics, particularly in the nature of particles. Notably, she "constructed a large class of examples of mirror symmetry using orbifold methods and Kummer K3 surfaces" (from here) Her research also unfolds deep connections between non-commutative geometry and algebraic geometry, and she has many contributions in topological quantum field theories.

Dorit Aharonov: is an Israeli computer scientist. In 2005, she was profiled in Nature. One of her major achievements was to show that even in the presence of interfering noise, a quantum computer could still achieve reliable results. Because quantum computers require considerable isolation from their surroundings (the 'quantum processors' should not interact with their surroundings, or the resultant errors will rapidly degrade the computation), it was thought that these would remain theoretical curiosities. Her work in quantum error correction went a long way in establishing the domain as technologically viable. In addition, she has worked in the quantum scale problem - why do quantum effects manifest only at subatomic levels but appear to vanish at human scales? "Aharonov showed that for many noisy quantum systems, there is a level of noise above which a transition to classical behaviour is inevitable. Such transitions are much sharper than expected from other theories that predict a gradual shift away from quantum behaviour."

Hopefully, at least one of them wins the medal.

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May 25, 2010

Lost Lands and Dying Peoples

It's good to know Farsi and travel around Central Asia. People in a large belt of countries extending all the way to Afghanistan speak variants of the language, and if one can't get by with Farsi, why, Russian always helps. Our man Daniel Metcalfe is a traveller with a purpose and with the requisite skills, and it's no wonder that his book Out of Steppe has the makings of an excellent account of little-known people.

Little-known to the West, of course. The people in these lands are all quite aware of each other, having traded and intermarried amongst themselves for centuries. They share not only language but also culture. But the six nations that Metcalfe wants to seek out are islands of separateness even in this world. All of them find life a struggle in every way.

Metcalfe meets the Karakalpaks who live near the decimated Aral Sea. Once famous fishermen, they have been reduced to diseased subsistence by the utter environmental disaster that has befallen their land. They see no future for themselves. The Germans of Kazakhstan, forcibly settled there by Stalin, are the remnants of a proud people who had settled in Russia under the favour of Catherine the Great. They now find themselves isolated amongst the drug and alcohol-riven communities that surround them, neither fish nor fowl, neither true Germans nor yet Russians. Bukharan Jews are next on Metcalfe's agenda. Here another sort of disaster is going on - as the local Jews die out, the diaspora comes in touristily, and find that all the gems of Jewish architecture are slowly rotting away, and the Uzbeks who own the properties now are more interested in presenting a Disneyfied concoction to the visitors, thereby exacerbating the cultural vandalism. The few Jews that dwell in Bukhara are insular, and it's only by pretending to be Jewish himself that he manages to insinuate himself into their lives.

The remaining three cultures are somewhat of an afterthought, I felt. The Sogdians of Turkmenistan and the Hazaras of Bamiyan are dealt with in pedestrian fashion, and the Kalashas of the Hindu Kush are probably treated better in other books (such as Alice Albinia's Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River). Metcalfe can be commended for his zeal here, but the early parts of the book are much better.

Overall, an uneven tome with both high and low points.

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Nov 12, 2009

Dimashq Cartoon Style

We stand at the Citadel by the statue to the greatest of Muslim heroes and wonder: surely he didn’t resemble a Gaul? All that’s missing is a menhir, and Saladin, chivalrous scourge of the Crusaders, could have been one of the better-looking denizens of Asterix’s village. We admire his flowing moustache, his flowing locks, his flowing frock and his frothing horse, and we ignore the tour bus that suddenly disgorges a chattering mass of foreigners agog to come face to face with the mighty hero. It is a sad truth, we find, that a Westernised fantasy is deeply embedded in the minds of the Levantines. We learn that the statue is based on some Western art from the 19th century, and that it was created by Abdallah al-Sayed, a Syrian sculptor, in 1993. It does not surprise me at all that one of the Baathist head-honchos was taken up with myth-making Disney-style, and wanted to see the Kurdish warrior looking like Vercingetorix.

saladin

To visit Damascus is to breathe the dusty air of one of the oldest cities of the world. Great wonders of art and zainabarchitecture have been installed, torn down, rebuilt and renovated here. To my atavistic eye, there’s little that is elegant in the local modern sensibility. Ripe and purple is the work of contemporary Middle-Eastern architects; at least, that’s what I deduce from the zainab minaretover-the-top concoctions that have been put up here in recent years.

And I don’t just mean poor Saladin. Wealthy Iranians have been buying up large parts of  the old city, attempting either to renovate lovely Damascene houses for business, or to have a holiday pad whenever they tire of the Islamic republic. The locals are not best pleased – who is happy to see his locality become unaffordable because of a bunch of yuppies turning up and buying up the entire area? – but they seem to appreciate the shrine to Sayyida Zainab, grand-daughter of the Prophet, and one of the remarkable women in the Shiite pantheon. The Iranians have brought in a particularly over-the-top sensibility here, and created a lollipop of a mosque. 

I suppose it is difficult to give up entirely on the architectural tropes of yesteryears. Lace and tile and cupola and minaret are repeated time and again, almost in mimeographed style, wherever ‘modern’ Iranian architects decide to put down a monument to their faith. Virtually every visitor to Sayyida Zainab’s mosque feels immediately transported to Iran. This is a shame in some ways, for it means the loss of a Syrian character. On the other hand, under the Ummayads, Syrian art and architecture spread throughout the region. I guess art, like much else in life, has a cyclical nature, and when one style has had its day, another will soon come to take its place.

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Aug 1, 2009

Forty Days Ago We Died

By Setareh Sabety

Forty days ago we died
Along with that mother
Whose scream I still hear
Not only in my ear
But deeper
In the bloody cracks
Of my broken heart.
Forty days ago
We saw life
Chased out of
The young eyes
Of someone else’s daughter
Forty days ago
We all died
Bearing witness
To the naked cruelty
Equally random and arrogant
Of those we refuse to call
Men
Songs of heroism anger me,
Drown in the wail
Of mourning mothers
Churning in my stomach
Martyrs we do not need
We are dead already
We died forty days ago
Bearing witness
To the uncensored
‘Graphic content’
Of human cruelty!
What we need
Is a miracle:
A mother
Whose newborn’s
First cry
Rips through
The clean crisp
Air of freedom
Finally found.

(From Tehranbureau)

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Feb 13, 2009

Newsha Tavakolian


Growing up in Teheran, Newsha Tavakolian at first wanted to be a singer. She has a bright, slightly husky voice that showed great promise. Then she attended a photography course, people appreciated her photographs, and she decided she had found her metier. At the age of 16, she started knocking on door of a local newspaper, asking for a job. They sent her away, but she persisted for a month, going to the offices every day, until finally they gave in and made her the telephone operator. 1


Months later, they told me that I'd done very well but that my voice was too young. From that moment, I worked as the newspaper's photographer.


But it wasn't as easy as all that. Of the five photographers on the staff, she was the only woman. Her editor wouldn't send her to trouble spots, being protective of her. One day none of the men was available for an assignment, so she had to go. When the picture she took was published the next day, her colleagues were angry and wanted her to stay out of it. But she was very proud. 2

Over the ensuing 12 years, she has developed an impressive portfolio and considerable experience in photography of power and delicacy. Her oeuvre has extended from coverage of the Iraq war to the depredations of the floods of the river Kosi to the aftermath of the earthquake in Kashmir.

She is one of the youngest professional photographers in Iran, and is widely regarded as a role model for girls in that country. A BBC programme on life in Teheran focussed on the work and achievements of three women; she is one of them.

In a field dominated by men, she finds it easy to get stories and pictures that would be denied to them. Because women open up to her, she can enter their lives easily, unobtrusively.

Newsha points out that, historically, ever since Iranians realised that the West was more progressive than their own country, they have changed their art-forms to suit Western approval. She does not like this because it means that Iranian art becomes less relevant to Iranians, and contributes to stereotypical views among the foreigners. This is an argument that has increasing resonance in most of the developing world. As art becomes a commodity, only what makes money is considered valuable. Newsha would like Iranians to push social boundaries and extend beyond Western appreciation 3.

Currently, there is an exhibition of her works at the Side Gallery in Newcastle. It's called Sisters in Chanel and Chador, which is less evocative of her sense of irony than demonstrative of a fundamental aspect of life in Iran. In the same family, there can be a member who wears western couture and another who revels in the traditional. Newsha's own family has this dichotomy: her father's side is conservative, while her mother's is liberal, but there is no tension between them, and they get along very well. 4

Thirty years after the Islamic Revolution that brought power to the clerics, Iranian society has not remained static and cowed. It is not rare any longer to see men with long hair and body piercing in the posher parts of the capital. The culture is changing, says Newsha. If her brother had studded his lips like this a few years ago, her father would have thrown him out of the house (here she makes a fluid kicking motion which is as funny as it is cute). But not any longer.

Of course, there are still restrictions on individual freedoms. There are unwritten red lines, censorship rules that cannot be crossed. The extent of hair exposed by women under their scarves is a function of the diligence of the clerical vigilantes. For all the claims of a moral state, there is rampant drug abuse and prostitution and sundered families. For every few steps that society makes towards hope, there are severe pull-backs. But the Iranian loves Iran, flaws and all, and strives to improve it. The Iranian doesn't hate the West, and would like, more than anything, to have cordial relations with those suspicious people in Europe and America.

One of the great advantages that have accrued to women after the clerical takeover is that Ayatollah Khomeini, staunch conservative in almost every other way, was also a literal reader of the holy book. Nowhere did it say that women should not work outside the home, he declared. The Prophet may have stopped his wives from employment, but he did not say that others should do so. And therefore from 1978 women have been entering the public scene in manifold ways - education, scientific research, and business. As long as they remain 'modest', there is little opposition to their presence in public.

Of course, as in any conservative society, there is a wide difference between the exterior and the interior. As the children of the Revolution grow into adulthood and take up their place as drivers of the Iranian economy, these differences begin to narrow, and the private and the public meld more and more. Newsha documents this change with an unerring eye.

Further reading

1. Patricia Simón, Newsha Tavakolian, Iran's inside story, Sep 13, 2006.

2. Loolwa Khazoom, A Witness to History, ElleGirl.com, Sep 2005.

3. Newsha Tavakolian, Images of Iran: Aiding the Stereotypes, Nov 2004.

4. Barbara Hodgson, Iran in Focus, The Journal, Jan 14, 2009.

And check out some of Newsha's spectacular work here.

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