By the time Nils Holgersson turned forty-eight, he already lived very far north, in Jokkmokk, the capital of Swedish Lapland, which could only with the utmost pretension be called a capital city, since it was no more than a small, remote village upon which, as Tacitus wrote, the sun never shone in the winter and never set in the summer. He worked as a custodian at the only local high school, which had three classes for each grade and a dormitory so that students who lived as far as 100, 200 or even 1000 kilometers away would have a place to stay. The school menu was standard for Sweden: mashed potatoes with butter and strips of bacon on Mondays, fried fish and potatoes on Tuesdays, pea soup and pancakes with jelly on Wednesdays, tuna salad on a roll on Thursdays, and noodles with ground beef on Fridays, which was the children’s favorite. He knew all this from his wife, Maria, who was the cook in the school where he worked as the custodian.From The Princess, by Alit Karp, translated from the Hebrew by Ilana Kurshan, The Guardian, February 2, 2016.
In Amos Oz's Panther In The Basement, the twelve year old narrator is being babysat by Yardena, on whom he has a terrific crush. She cooks a remarkably fragrant chicken dish that has the boy drooling and hot.
Meanwhile, aflame with desire and anticipation and pangs of hunger, swallowing back the surging saliva, I laid the table for the two of us, facing each other like Mother and Father. I decided to leave my usual place empty. As I laid the table I could see Yardena out of the corner of my eye tossing chicken pieces in the frying pan, to remind them who they were, tasting the sauce, adjusting the seasoning, spooning it over the food which had taken on a wonderful hue of burnished brass or old gold, and her arms, her shoulders, and her hips came alive in a kind of dance inside her dress, protected by my mother's apron, as though the chicken pieces were shaking her whiel she shook them.
When we had eaten our fill, we sat facing each other picking at a bunch of sweet grapes; then we devoured half a water-melon and drank coffee together even though I told Yardena honestly and bravely that I wasn't allowed coffee, especially in the evening before going to bed.
Yardena said:
'They're not here.'
In the early 90s, shortly after the implosion of the USSR, the world was suddenly awash with brilliant Soviet scientists and engineers who found themselves unemployed and impoverished. Many of them wanted nothing more than to continue their work, while others seized the opportunity to move to greener pastures abroad. A small number were coopted by countries and terrorists seeking nuclear and biochemical weapons know-how. In order to keep the rest from succumbing to such temptation, US institutions organised monthly stipends for them, while George Soros created the International Science Foundation to support the sciences in the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a large-scale emigration of Jewish scientists began to Israel, which found itself swamped by these riches.
I was at TIFR in the summer one of those years, and the notice-boards in the cafe were festooned with newspaper clippings describing efforts by various countries to attract the scientists. Some pooh-poohed the miserly stipends the US were paying out - $500 a year or so. Some marvelled at the Chinese willingness to pay top dollar for expertise. And many bemoaned Indian bureaucratic intransigence and hierarchical pig-headedness that prevented us from paying higher salaries to attract Soviet scientists than our own professors were earning. And thus a superb opportunity to revamp our scientific and technical base, and to improve the calibre of our research and our universities was forever lost.
For the Israelis, though, the incoming rush was a mixed blessing. Haaretz recently had a beautiful piece on the diaspora from the Soviet Union. The Jews of the USSR did much to change the political landscape in Israel, especially towards a conservative direction. They also added considerable fillip to cultural diversity. But many of them found it hard to adjust to their new lives. Israel did not have the capacity to accommodate every brilliant Jewish scientist who arrived. After two or three top-notch algebraic theorists arrived, for example, where would the fourth be placed? And so many a scientist, who anywhere else in the world would have been a superstar, found themselves sidelined and frustrated.
It is a heartbreaking thing when pearls are so abundant that their shine is lessened.
In the middle of all the Malayalam dialects, both extant and extinct, was that spoken by the thousand-year old community of Jews. Jewish Malayalam is an admixture of Hebrew and Malayalam, written in the Malayalam script, spoken extensively until the middle of the 1950s when Keralite Jews began their big emigration to Israel. These days few Jews remain in Kerala, and the language is on the verge of extinction even in Israel.
As with Mappila Malayalam (that spoken by Malayali Muslims), this Jewish dialect was a popular tongue, generally used in the secular sphere. For religious purposes, the Jews continued to use Hebrew. But they wrote songs for weddings in Malayalam, the oldest of which appear to be from the 15th century and are close in style to contemporary Hindu compositions (such as the Payyannūrpāṭṭə, which actually mentions Jews as members of merchant guilds). The Arabs who settled and intermarried in Kerala created their own equivalent dialect, but they wrote it in the Arabic script, and it is suspected that they did so because they felt part of an Arabian ocean that stretched from East Africa through Arabia to South Asia. But the Jews were a minority cut off from the rest of their coreligionists, and so felt no need to distinguish themselves in Hebrew script.
For a roundup of the Jewish presence in India you should read Maddy's various essays [2, 3], or Edna Fernandes' excellent book [4].
Jewish Malayalam literature consists mainly of compendia of wedding songs, as mentioned above, and written in 'castolects' different from the standardized version of Malayalam. These songs are called nāṭaṉpāṭṭə, or regional songs. After emigration to Israel, in order to transmit these songs to younger generations unfamiliar with Malayalam script, these were transcribed into Hebrew. Some of these books were curious admixtures - Hebrew songs written in Malayalam, Malayalam songs written in Hebrew - to cater to illiteracy in one or the other tongue.
There were two types of songs in the Jewish Malayalam liturgy, a male variety descending from the Arabic tafsir (translation of the Bible into Arabic) which incorporated archaic modes in Malayalam, and a female variety called arttham, descending from Sanskrit performance art, which remained closer to the spoken Malayalam. Both included Hebrew components including excerpts from the Torah.
Interestingly, in Jewish Malayalam, kinship words were more akin to the Muslims (e.g. umma for mother, kaakka for elder brother) while social terms were shared with the Hindu (e.g. taṟavaːɖə ‘ancestral home’; kaːrɳɳoːrə ‘the eldest male in the clan’). Other words are also shared in usage and origin with the Muslims, such as moːlyaːrǝ, ‘rabbi’ (which comes from muðaliyār, ‘leader’) with moylyārə, ‘religious guide.’
Jewish Malayalam has undergone more changes since the migration to Israel. Meanings have drifted a bit: guɳam, ‘good quality,’ and doːȿam, ‘fault, bad quality,’ now denote ‘luck’ and ‘character’. Hebrew words have entered the vocabulary, even if they have undergone semantic shifts. An elderly aunt would tease one woman with suːṟaː ellaːm poːyi (Your beauty is gone), where suːṟaː means 'form' in Hebrew, but is used to mean 'beauty' in Jewish Malayalam.
Nicknames applying to individuals (oːmaṉa-ppeːr) and families have a strange and compelling beauty. A rabbi who preferred veɭɭappam (rice flat bread) over tuition fees was called veɭɭappamoːlyaːrǝ 'rice-bread rabbi.' A very tall man called Ephraim was called kaːlan efraːyim, ‘legged Ephraim.’ A Jewish family excommunicated in the mid-19th century are still referred to as 'paːmbǝ' (snake in Malayalam). The nickname comes from the Hebrew initials of the words describing the most severe excommunication: niduy (banishment), ħerem (excommunication) and ʃamataɂ (curse), that is n-ħ-ʃ (נח“ש), which reads ‘snake’ in Hebrew!
The general greeting in Malayalam is sugam taṉṉe alle? (all's well, isn't it?) but a jocose version exists in Jewish Malayalam, poking fun at the ostensibly miserly Cochin Jews, which goes: tiṉṉ’ oːɳɖ’ all-eː vann-e? (you've eaten and come, right?) so that the visitor needn't be fed.
There are some proverbs unique to the Jews that other Malayalis do not recognise. One such, kaːlaṉ.ḏe peːṟe poːy-aːlumjuːðaṉ.ḏe peːṟe poːv-alleː, translates as 'better follow a demon than a Jew', and is used when a Jew has deceived or cheated someone.
More good stuff: Jewish Malayalam jokes, stories, nursery rhymes and riddles. Check out the Gamliel paper [1] and references therein.
Also, Bala Menon's blog post from 2011 is pretty neat: The 'Song of Evarayi' & Other Cochin Jewish Songs.
For a roundup of the Jewish presence in India you should read Maddy's various essays [2, 3], or Edna Fernandes' excellent book [4].
Jewish Malayalam literature consists mainly of compendia of wedding songs, as mentioned above, and written in 'castolects' different from the standardized version of Malayalam. These songs are called nāṭaṉpāṭṭə, or regional songs. After emigration to Israel, in order to transmit these songs to younger generations unfamiliar with Malayalam script, these were transcribed into Hebrew. Some of these books were curious admixtures - Hebrew songs written in Malayalam, Malayalam songs written in Hebrew - to cater to illiteracy in one or the other tongue.
There were two types of songs in the Jewish Malayalam liturgy, a male variety descending from the Arabic tafsir (translation of the Bible into Arabic) which incorporated archaic modes in Malayalam, and a female variety called arttham, descending from Sanskrit performance art, which remained closer to the spoken Malayalam. Both included Hebrew components including excerpts from the Torah.
Interestingly, in Jewish Malayalam, kinship words were more akin to the Muslims (e.g. umma for mother, kaakka for elder brother) while social terms were shared with the Hindu (e.g. taṟavaːɖə ‘ancestral home’; kaːrɳɳoːrə ‘the eldest male in the clan’). Other words are also shared in usage and origin with the Muslims, such as moːlyaːrǝ, ‘rabbi’ (which comes from muðaliyār, ‘leader’) with moylyārə, ‘religious guide.’
Jewish Malayalam has undergone more changes since the migration to Israel. Meanings have drifted a bit: guɳam, ‘good quality,’ and doːȿam, ‘fault, bad quality,’ now denote ‘luck’ and ‘character’. Hebrew words have entered the vocabulary, even if they have undergone semantic shifts. An elderly aunt would tease one woman with suːṟaː ellaːm poːyi (Your beauty is gone), where suːṟaː means 'form' in Hebrew, but is used to mean 'beauty' in Jewish Malayalam.
Nicknames applying to individuals (oːmaṉa-ppeːr) and families have a strange and compelling beauty. A rabbi who preferred veɭɭappam (rice flat bread) over tuition fees was called veɭɭappamoːlyaːrǝ 'rice-bread rabbi.' A very tall man called Ephraim was called kaːlan efraːyim, ‘legged Ephraim.’ A Jewish family excommunicated in the mid-19th century are still referred to as 'paːmbǝ' (snake in Malayalam). The nickname comes from the Hebrew initials of the words describing the most severe excommunication: niduy (banishment), ħerem (excommunication) and ʃamataɂ (curse), that is n-ħ-ʃ (נח“ש), which reads ‘snake’ in Hebrew!
The general greeting in Malayalam is sugam taṉṉe alle? (all's well, isn't it?) but a jocose version exists in Jewish Malayalam, poking fun at the ostensibly miserly Cochin Jews, which goes: tiṉṉ’ oːɳɖ’ all-eː vann-e? (you've eaten and come, right?) so that the visitor needn't be fed.
There are some proverbs unique to the Jews that other Malayalis do not recognise. One such, kaːlaṉ.ḏe peːṟe poːy-aːlumjuːðaṉ.ḏe peːṟe poːv-alleː, translates as 'better follow a demon than a Jew', and is used when a Jew has deceived or cheated someone.
More good stuff: Jewish Malayalam jokes, stories, nursery rhymes and riddles. Check out the Gamliel paper [1] and references therein.
Also, Bala Menon's blog post from 2011 is pretty neat: The 'Song of Evarayi' & Other Cochin Jewish Songs.
References
- O. Gamliel (2013). 'Voices Yet to be Heard: On Listening to the Last Speakers of Jewish Malayalam', Journal of Jewish Languages, (1), pp 135-137. Brill.
- Maddy's Ramblings: Abraham, Asha and the Geniza.
- Maddy's Ramblings: Sara's Story.
- Edna Fernandes (2008). The Last Jews of Kerala: The Two Thousand Year History of India's Forgotten Jewish Community. Skyhorse.
Welcome, folks, to the seventy-third Carnivalesque, the Ancient/Modern edition of the popular History blog carnival. Thanks to all those who contributed and sent suggestions.
To start with, take a look at this timeline (timelines being some sort of minor addiction for me) of historical events that occurred in years ending in 73. Trite, eh? There’s considerable uncertainty about the older dates, of course, but if there’s at least one source that speculates an event occurred in such a year, well, I’ve bunged it in.
Events in the years before Christ (or Common Era, to be less religious) appear against negative numbers in this timeline. If you click on any of the titles, a little window should open up with some extra information.
This is the week after Easter, and so a light Christian history thread runs through this carnival. But fear not – there’s lots of other stuff to whet your secular appetites.
And so, to begin:
Africa
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| Kemsit, the Nubian queen of the Egyptian King Mentuhotep II (2061-2010 B.C.), and her servants; from a painting in her tomb chamber wall |
Would you be willing to trek across the Egyptian desert all the way to Chad? Even today it’s a perilous journey, and yet there’s evidence that the Pharaoh Mentuhotep II (2061-2010 BC) organised an expedition to that western land. Read about it in Owen Jarus’ post in Unreported Heritage News.
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Europe
Around 3500 BC, the Neolithic inhabitants of the island of Jersey built a worship mound that came to be known as La Hougue Bie. Millennia later, a church was built atop it. The Neolithic mound was equinoctically aligned, and it turns out so is the church. Alun Salt tells the story.
You may have seen some racy news recently - First Gay Caveman Found! - etc. Bunkum. The Corded Ware (2900-2500 BC) burial site near Prague was not of cavemen; rather it's of pre-Bronze Age farmers. Why do they think it was a gay caveman? John Hawks does a spot of debunking.
If you have wondered why Isocrates (436-338 BC) is not as well-known as, say, Plato, wonder no more. Michael Anderson has the scuttlebutt in his Ancient History Blog.
How likely is it that a list of survivors of the Battle of Marathon survived to this day? Or that such a list ever existed? Rogueclassicism has an overview of the affair of the Marathon tablet (403 BC ?) and its epigraphy.
What do Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius have in common? Adrian Murdoch’s series of podcasts on Gibbons’ “five good emperors” (AD 96-180) reveals all that you might want to know. Get them at his blog Bread and Circuses.
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| Ivan Bilibin's Illustration to the Lay of Igor's Campaign (from Wikimedia Commons) |
‘In AD 1185, as the Kievan Rus Empire was starting to deteriorate, a little known prince on the eastern Russian borders led his outnumbered men into battle against Mongolian invaders, the Polovtsians (Kumans). This battle and its aftermath would become the topic of the Russian literary epic, “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign.”’ Seesaw discusses the battle, the epic and its musical successors in Russia, Past and Present.
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| St. John of Nepomuk, Charles Bridge, Prague by dlnwelch, on Flickr |
If you wander about the Upper Palatinate in Germany, you might find yourself wondering – as Patrick Shrier did – why there are statues of St John of Nepomuk (d. 1398) on nearly every bridge in sight. What’s a Czech saint doing in Germany? Shrier investigates and reports in Patrick’s Military History Blog.
A oft-repeated statement is that the famous vegetarian Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) was 'ahead of his time' in sundry disciplines. While this may be somewhat true of his art, it doesn't apply to his technical work, says Thony C. in the Renaissance Mathematicus.
There’s no end to weirdness in Europe, and Vlad the Impaler is about as weird as a historical character can get. Soon after taking up the throne of Wallachia (1457), he invited the nobility to an Easter feast and – well, Executed Today has the story.
'Tis the 550th anniversary of the Battle of Towton (1461) - one among many in the Wars of the Roses in sunny England - and there are no pictorial representations extant of that battle. So what was Sheila Corr to do when she had to provide a suitable illustration for an article in History Today? Find out here.
Speaking some more of seriously weird things: there was much faith in putting one’s fate in the hands of chance (or God) – even secular arguments were sought to be settled by means of trial by fire. One of the last such trials occurred in Florence in 1498, as Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog reports in Barbecuing Friars in Late Medieval Florence.
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Middle-East
While it’s widely believed that the Abrahamic faiths are monotheistic, there is considerable evidence that Judaism, the oldest of them, was initially polytheistic. JK at Varnam explains the ins and outs of how god became God and acquired a wife, and other gods were consigned to oblivion (c. 8th century BC)
What’s up with physicists thinking they can contribute to historical analysis? Surely the age of the dilettante is past? Jona Lendering in New at LacusCurtius & Livius excoriates Colin Humphreys for his claim that Christ’s Last Supper took place on a Wednesday, and not – as historians agree – on Maundy Tuesday. “The trouble with the Jaubert-Humphreys Thesis is that it solves a problem that does not exist by using a method that is self-contradictory…Unfortunately, this is not an innocent, funny story about scientists who should not pretend they are historians.”
In the early days of Christianity, Easter was the chief religious festival. Birthdays were considered a pagan relic. So how did Christmas become the important festival it is today? Ranjith Kollanur explains in his blog A View From My Disjointed Laptop.
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| European depiction of the Persian doctor Al-Razi, in Gerardus Cremonensis "Recueil des traités de médecine", 1250-1260. (Wikimedia Commons) |
When and where was the definitive recognition of smallpox made? In Persia around AD 900, a medic called al-Razi wrote a treatise named al-Judari wa al-Hasbah (On Smallpox and Measles). Lapham’s Quarterly blog has a small write-up.
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Asia
74,000 years ago, human beings were passing the Malay peninsula on their great migration across the planet. Archaeological digs in Perak revealed a sumptuous burial of a man, which showed that Malaysia was no civilisational backwater. Judith Weingarten has the story of the digs and the feisty woman who conducted the research in her blog Zenobia: Empress of the East.
According to the Vedas, a mighty river called the Saraswati flowed through the plains of north India. There have been efforts to identify this river - which no longer exists (in its original size, at least) - and there are controversies galore about its history. Researchers in geology, linguistics, archaeology, history, and climate science have contributed, and Michel Danino has a post discussing some of this interdisciplinary work.
According to the Vedas, a mighty river called the Saraswati flowed through the plains of north India. There have been efforts to identify this river - which no longer exists (in its original size, at least) - and there are controversies galore about its history. Researchers in geology, linguistics, archaeology, history, and climate science have contributed, and Michel Danino has a post discussing some of this interdisciplinary work.
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| Emperor Wu dispatching Zhang Qian to Central Asia (138 to 126 BCE), Mogao Caves mural, 618-712 CE (Wikimedia Commons) |
Tired of horsemen attacking his villages, kidnapping the women and killing the men, and realising that they were untouchable until he obtained a powerful cavalry, in 103 BC the Chinese emperor Wu sent a taskforce to the land of the Wusun to bring back the heavenly horse. Heather Pringle tells the story and its later ramifications.
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| Japanese samurai boarding Yuan ships in 1281 (Wikimedia Commons) |
In AD 1281, Kublai Khan sent a fleet to invade Japan. 730 years later, the History Channel purported to explain it all to unsuspecting aficionados of popular history. Learn what really happened, and why you shouldn’t trust (ever!) the History Channel - in this piece by Tatsunoshi in Shogun-Ki.
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The Americas
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| Funerary Mask, 9th-11th century Peru; (Lambayeque) Hammered gold with cinnabar and copper overlays, cinnabar; (Wikimedia Commons) |
From the 8th century AD, the Lambayeque culture flourished in northern Peru. Like their more famous successors, the Incas, these were a people wont to fertility rituals and human sacrifices. How about combining the two by sacrificing women? Monty’s World has the story.
Archaeologists long thought that the cultures of Central America and North America had little or no interaction. Now it appears that there may have been thriving trade between them, lasting as long as five centuries from AD 900. The Pueblos of southwest USA drank cacao, which they could only have got from Mesoamerica. As Gregory LeFever reports in his blog Ancient Tides, they would have paid for the cacao with turquoise.
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| The 400-breasted Mayahuel Aztec Goddess of the maguey or agave (Wikimedia Commons) |
Why not ponder the fate of the Aztecs (13th – 16th centuries) and their rabbits? Even before the sanguinary and Easter-loving Spaniards turned up at their doorstep, they celebrated the bunny by naming a day in its honour. And they got as drunk as 400 rabbits. Say what? Judugrovee reveals the story in the blog The Complete Mesoamerica … and more.
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And, to round things off, interdisciplinaryment:
Art
When a snake escaped the Bronx Zoo a few days ago, a contest was announced in some papers to name her. Why not Wadjet? Here’s a post by Madeleine Cody in the Brooklyn Museum’s blog about the ancient Egyptian snake goddess, her history, her mythology and some of the art based on her.
Have you heard of the Codex Aureus? It’s a beautiful 10th century parchment manuscript featuring the four gospels. Peacay at the ever wonderful BibliOdyssey has the scoop.
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| Allegoric figure of Fortitude from the Four Virtues by unknown artist (also attributed to Botticelli), c. 1490, fresco, Castle Chapel, Esztergom |
Lovely Renaissance frescoes (1460s) were found in Esztergom, in Hungary. Zsombor Jékely in Medieval Hungary investigates - are they really by Botticelli?
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| Untitled, by Jan van Eyck (or Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife) (Wikimedia Commons) |
And we have another question: Is Van Eyck’s painting titled Arnolfini Portrait (1434) meant to portray Arnolfini’s wife? Considering there were five Arnolfinis in Bruges at the time, and we aren’t even sure which Arnolfini commissioned the painting, this might appear to be a fraught query. Alberti’s Window has a report.
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A Review or Two
Ever wondered about water and windmills? In Medieval History Geek, Curt Emanuel posts a review of Wind and Water in the Middle Ages: Fluid Technologies from Antiquity to the Renaissance. |The book is a scholarly compendium in ‘three general thematic sections with three papers having an archaeological focus, five concentrating on how mills "worked"; not physically but rather how they and their uses were integrated into society. The final three papers discuss how mills and milling were viewed by contemporaries through an examination of art and literature.’
While one Goth sacked Ancient Rome, a Vandal was its saviours. How’s that, you ask? That helpful Vandal was Stilicho. In Armarium Magnum, Tim O’Neill reviews at length a recent book by Ian Hughes titled Stilicho: The Vandal Who Saved Rome.
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That’s all for now, folks. Hope you enjoyed this round-up. The host of the next edition of this carnival will be announced shortly at the Carnivalesque website, and here’s a heads-up: it will cater to the Early Modern period, that is, AD 1500-1800.
Now that the four latest Fields medallists have been announced, the popular bit of the International Congress of Mathematicians is over and the technical bits begin. Desis and women have to wait a bit longer for their first Fields awardee, but the Vietnamese must be over the moon. Ngô Bảo Châu has won, while the usual Russian and French contingent has been satisfied by Stanislav Smirnov and Cédric Villani respectively. Rounding up the quartet is Elon Lindenstrauss from Israel.
The announcer of these prizes, whose name I didn't catch, quipped weakly that Villani was a real French (as opposed to Châu who works in France), and that you could tell from his last name that Smirnov is Russian (albeit based in Switzerland).
Once again the Langlands program comes up trumps in Ngô Bảo Châu's work; Smirnov's contributions are in mathematical physics and analysis; Lindenstrauss has applied ergodic theory to classical number theory; and Villani's work is in mass transport (which, contrary to what you might imagine, has little to do with either the London Underground or imprisonment in the Andamans), an active field contributing to plasma physics.
Congratulations to all of them.
The announcer of these prizes, whose name I didn't catch, quipped weakly that Villani was a real French (as opposed to Châu who works in France), and that you could tell from his last name that Smirnov is Russian (albeit based in Switzerland).
Once again the Langlands program comes up trumps in Ngô Bảo Châu's work; Smirnov's contributions are in mathematical physics and analysis; Lindenstrauss has applied ergodic theory to classical number theory; and Villani's work is in mass transport (which, contrary to what you might imagine, has little to do with either the London Underground or imprisonment in the Andamans), an active field contributing to plasma physics.
Congratulations to all of them.
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.
Hasn't everything been tried already? The issues dividing Israelis and Palestinians are so deeply entrenched that almost no solution comes to mind.
I think I have the answer, though. It's all to do with finding points of commonality, of convergence of view. There's only one: Bollywood.
Yes, that's right. Bollywood. Both Israelis and Palestinians love the effervescent product of the Hindi film industry. So much so that a recent book, co-written by the Israeli Etgar Keret and the Palestinian Samir El-Youssef, titled Gaza Blues: Different Stories
, has pivotal paragraphs alluding to the great Indian filmography.
I think I have the answer, though. It's all to do with finding points of commonality, of convergence of view. There's only one: Bollywood.
Yes, that's right. Bollywood. Both Israelis and Palestinians love the effervescent product of the Hindi film industry. So much so that a recent book, co-written by the Israeli Etgar Keret and the Palestinian Samir El-Youssef, titled Gaza Blues: Different Stories
, has pivotal paragraphs alluding to the great Indian filmography.I was angry and sad. And I cried. I cried until tears ran down my cheeks. People in the street looked at me and thought that I had just come out of the cinema, and I had seen an Indian film, the tragic story of which had torn my heart apart. How could anyone cry in that way if he hadn't seen an Indian film?And again:
"Shoshi - what's that stand for?" I tried to steer the conversation onto a new track. "It's short for Shoshana. My parents always wanted a daughter," Shoshi came around. He closed his eyes and wiggled his arse, and I could tell he was about to start singing. He does that sometimes. You can just tell he watches lots of Bollywood movies. "When I was a tot / Father beat me a lot / He didn't want a son / But what's done is done."So, to conclude, what's the solution? Here it is: deprive the two parties of Bollywood films until peace breaks out between them.
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