Category Personalities

Why is Dr. Jagadish Shukla famous?

Dr. Jagadish Shukla was born in a small village, Mirdha, in Uttar Pradesh. The village had no electricity, not even proper roads. The primary school did not have a building, and Jagadish Shukla had his early classes under a large banyan tree! He could not study science in high school because the schools did not include it.

He went to Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and graduated in Physics, Mathematics and Geology. He did MS in Geophysics and then finished his PhD too. Later he got a ScD (Doctor of Science) in Meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He chose a career in the atmospheric sciences and became a professor at George Mason University in the U.S.

Dr. Shukla’s study areas include the Asian monsoon dynamics, deforestation and desertification. Do you know what is desertification? It is when the soil loses its quality due to weather or human activity.

Dr. Shukla helped establish weather and climate research centres in India. He also established research institutions in Brazil and the U.S. He has been with the World Climate Research Programme since its start and founded the Centre for Ocean- Land-Atmosphere Studies, Virginia, U.S.

He has also established the Gandhi College in his village for educating rural students, especially women, and was awarded Padma Shri in 2012.

Picture Credit : Google 

What are the achievements of Ritabrata Munshi?

Ritabrata Munshi is a mathematician specialising in number theory. He is affiliated to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Number theory is a branch of mathematics that studies properties of positive integers or whole numbers that do not have a fraction or decimal part. Munshi made significant contribution to the number theory, in that he linked arithmetic geometry, representation theory and complex analysis in many ways. For this, he was awarded the Ramanujan Prize which is given for mathematicians under the age of 45 from a developing country.

Ritabrata Munshi did his doctoral studies at Princeton University in the U.S with Sir Andrew Wiles, a famous mathematician. After a few post-doctoral years in the U.S, he joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India.

He has received many awards for his work, including the Infosys Science Foundation’s 2017 award in mathematical sciences, the Birla Science Prize (2013) and the ISI Alumni gold medal. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2015. He was also awarded the ICTP Ramanujan Prize in 2018.

Munshi was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2016. Munshi was awarded the Swarna-Jayanti fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. He was also elected a fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2016.

In 2018 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). He was elected a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 2020.

He is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society and the Hardy-Ramanujan Journal.

Picture Credit : Google 

What’s in Shakespeare’s first folio?

Published seven years after William Shakespeare’s death in 1616, the first folio is credited with sustaining the legacy of the playwright and ensuring that generations could enjoy the bard’s plays.

What is a folio?

A folio is a large book made by folding sheets of paper in half, with each sheet forming four pages. This format was usually reserved for weighty historic or religious subjects. Shakespeare’s first folio was the first of its kind published in England devoted exclusively to plays.

Shakespeare’s first folio Published in 1623, the full title of Shakespeare’s first folio is Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.

The word folio refers to its considerable size. Plays prior to this were considered too trivial to be printed in such a large format. Assembled and edited by the playwright’s friends and fellow actors John Heminge and Henry Condell, the first folio contains 36 Shakespearean plays, 18 of which had never been printed before. Were it not for their appearance in the folio, they would most probably have been lost forever – they include As You Like It. The Tempest, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth.

It is believed that 800 copies of the first folio were produced, out of which 233 still exist. Each copy is said to be unique because the manuscripts were proofread and corrected while the printing was in progress.

Sold for a pound

The original selling price for a copy of Shakespeare’s first folio was one pound and like most books of that era, it was sold unbound so the buyers needed to have it bound in leather. Today, an original copy of this book can fetch more than two million pounds. It is easily the most important collection of plays ever published and valued throughout the world.

Picture Credit : Google 

What do we know about Abhay Ashtekar?

Dr. Abhay Ashtekar is famous world-wide for trying to connect Einstein’s Theory of Relativity with the principles of quantum mechanics. These two theories are conflicting by nature and scientists are divided between the two. Dr. Ashteker is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity, and its sub-field, loop quantum cosmology.

Abhay Ashtekar’s childhood was spent in many Indian metros, including Mumbai. He went to the University of Texas at Austin for his graduation in gravitation. His PhD was at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Robert Geroch. He held many positions at Oxford, Paris and Syracuse before settling at Pennsylvania.

In 1992, Penn State University created the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry specifically for him. Ashtekar and his colleagues calculated the entropy for a black hole. This matched a prediction made by Hawking. His approach to quantum gravity has been described as “The most important of all the attempts at ‘quantizing’ general relativity.”

Ashtekar was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science and one of only 40 Honorary Fellows of the Indian Academy of Sciences drawn from the international community. He won the Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society and Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has held the Krammers Visiting Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands and the Sir C. V. Raman Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

Currently he is the Eberly Professor of Physics and the Director of the Institute for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University.

Picture Credit : google 

What makes Jeemon Panniyammakal’s contributions to the society remarkable?

You might have heard about epidemiologists in the last two years, thanks to Covid-19. You may have read in newspapers or watched on TV epidemiologists expressing their expert opinion on the pandemic. An epidemiologist studies the origin, distribution and prevention of diseases.

Dr. Jeemon Panniyammakal is an epidemiologist working in Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology (SCTIMST), Thiruvananthapuram. He is an associate professor in the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies in SCTIMST.

Dr. Jeemon hails from Nilambur in Kerala. He has been doing research on cardiovascular diseases for the past 16 years. He introduced a model to reduce the risk for family members who are in the high-risk category for heart diseases. A trial run was done by randomly selecting the families and by bringing lifestyle changes followed by regular check-ups. This was seen to reduce the risk factor. The study was published in the medical journal Lancet Global Health.

Jeemon Panniyammakal completed his PhD from the University of Glasgow, U.K and MPH degree from the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences and Technology. He has conducted several surveys which are published as research articles. Treatment burden in primary care units, intervention for blood pressure reduction and study of children of epileptic women etc are a few among them. Some of these studies are focused on areas in the Malappuram district. According to Dr. Jeemon, reducing the amount of sugar in one’s coffee itself would make considerable difference in people’s health.

He won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology for medical sciences last year.

Picture Credit : google 

Who is Salvador Dali?

Salvador Dalí was a Spanish Surrealist painter and printmaker known for exploring subconscious imagery. Arguably, his most famous painting is The Persistence of Memory (1931), depicting limp melting watches.

“More than 100 years after his birth, the art world cannot quite figure out if Spanish Surrealist painter Salvador Dali (1904-89), was a genius or a madman!

He was just 14 when his works were first exhibited. At 17, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, but was expelled after four years for defying his teachers.

The French Surrealists were then trying to apply the theories of Sigmund Freud to painting and writing. Dali knew of Freud’s study of dreams and was fascinated with capturing them in paint.

International acclaim was not long in coming.  In 1933, he put up solo exhibitions in Paris and New York City. He became Surrealism’s poster boy.

In addition to Freudian imagery – staircases, keys, dripping candles – he also used his own symbols. His most famous painting “The Persistence of Memory”, features three ‘melting’ watches, and a fourth covered by a swarm of ants. One of the watches is draped on a strange form that is meant to be Dali’s deflated head!

As his fame grew, Dali diversified into jewellery, clothes and furniture design, painted sets for ballets and plays, wrote fiction, produced a dream sequence for the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “Spellbound” and set up displays for store windows.

He cut an extremely eccentric figure, with his dashing clothes and moustache. He once showed up for a Paris lecture in a Rolls Royce stuffed with cauliflowers. For a book promotion in New York, he dressed in a golden robe and lay on a bed!

In 1974, Figueres in Catalonia, Spain, opened the Dali Theatre-Museum with works donated by him.

PROFILE OF TIME

In Dali’s paintings, the concept of time is different, it melts. Everything is fluidic. The Profile of Time, a sculpture by Dali, has the soft watch hanging and drooping from the branch of a tree. The watch appeared for the first time in Dali’s 1931 painting ‘The Persistence of Memory’. The watch can be seen to be melting and finishing off as a huge drop.

APPARITION OF FACE AND FRUIT DISH ON A BEACH

The painting by Dali works on illusion. He called them ‘double images’. In this, there are three simultaneous images at work in a single painting. Dali’s double image paintings had a huge fan following. It is more like a puzzle. Here, one can see an illusion of a face, the image of a dish full of fruits, that of a dog.

Picture Credit : Google