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KUMARI L. A. MEERA
(1961–1985)

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 Kumari L. A. Meera, the youngest daughter of Mr. and Mrs.
L. K. Ananthakrishnan, was born on June 1st, 1961, in New Delhi. Her
academic career was uniformly brilliant with a distinction at the higher
secondary level and a University rank in the B.Sc. (Honours)
examination in Physics, from St. Stephens College, Delhi. After again
obtaining a rank in her M.Sc., which was at the Indian Institute of
Technology in Madras, she took up a Masters programme in
Computer Science at the same institution with a view to preparing
herself for the emerging applications of this area to physics. She was
strongly oriented towards research, having attended summer schools
at the Indian Institute of Science and the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research. Her teachers and colleagues recognised her
promise and motivation and confidently expected an outstanding
career in research. Her personality was warm and friendly with a
strong streak of hard work, determination, and helping others. These
characteristics endeared her to those who knew her.
She joined the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in
September 1985 for doctoral studies in physics. But in November of
the same year, her bright career was tragically cut short by her
untimely death.

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 M. S. RAGHUNATHAN

M. S. Raghunathan is a mathematician working in the area of Lie

Theory to which he has made important contributions. He is currently
DAE Homi Bhabha Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research from which institution he retired as Professor of Eminence
in 2006. Raghunathan is a Fellow of the three national science
academies in the country as well as of the Royal Society of London.
He is a recipient of the Bhatnagar Prize of CSIR and of the Third
World Academy Prize for mathematics. Raghunathan has also been
engaged in promotional activities for mathematics: he headed the
National Board for Higher Mathematics for 1987–2006 and currently
continues as a member. He was a member of the Executive
Committee of the International Mathematical Union during 1998–
2006. Currently he is the Chair of the Governing Council of the
Harish-Chandra Research Institute in Allahabad and the Steering
Committee of the Kerala School of Mathematics in Calicut.

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 Eighteenth Kumari L. A. Meera Memorial Lecture

The Queen of Sciences: Her Realm, Her

Influence and Her Health
by

M. S. Raghunathan

What is mathematics? That is evidently a difficult question to

answer. Nevertheless mathematics has had an independent
identity as an intellectual discipline since antiquity. In this talk, I will
first discuss the main characteristics that contribute to giving
mathematics its identity challenging in the process some common
negative perceptions about mathematics, viz., that mathematics is
a dry unimaginative subject, that its rigorous discipline is forbidding
and that its cold logic destroys all sensitivity in its practitioners. I
will then briefly dwell on the importance of mathematics to our
society and finally say something about the state of mathematics
research and teaching in our country

This talk is about mathematics. Carl Friederich Gauss, who along

with Archimedes and Newton is considered one of the three
greatest mathematicians of all time, described mathematics as “the
queen of all sciences”; and so the title.
 The “queen” of sciences does seem to have many of the qualities
associated with that royal personage. There is a certain aloofness
about royalty and that can be seen in mathematics in relation to
other sciences: the very title of Newton’s magnum opus “The
mathematical principles of natural philosophy” suggests that
mathematics stands a little apart from other sciences, even while it
is its patronage that decisively confers the title “science” to any
body of knowledge. The queen in history has largely been a
decoration, an ornament, not a centre of power; and such power as
she wielded was largely indirect. The king is the power centre. His
aides make front page news while those of the queen have to
scurry to page three. Even in the nursery rhyme the queen is self-
indulgent and inconsequential: “she was in the parlour eating bread
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and honey” while the king was “counting out his money”. In all this
too the apellation “queen” fits mathematics very well. Perhaps that
explains why Gauss's claim for mathematics is seldom disputed.
 The queen of sciences is whimsical – queens are supposed to
be. The way mathematics develops is mostly determined by an
internal dynamic, the imagination of the mathematician. It does
every now and than draw upon natural sciences for inspiration, but
even when that happens, the new mathematics that is born, takes
on a life of its own and often charts a path that has little relevance
to its origins: the mathematician's imagination takes over.
Whimsical she is, yes, but the queen of sciences is not quite as
arbitrary as the queen in Alice's wonderland. There is an overriding
constraint in the way mathematics evolves: it has to be beautiful,
and beauty of course is the foremost quality that the popular mind
associates with the queen. Mathematics is indeed beautiful.
 The first intimations of mathematical activity are no doubt to be
found in counting. Counting is almost an involuntary act, but behind
it is profound abstraction, a great leap in imagination. The human
mind recognises an attribute that is common to a plethora of
collections, an attribute entirely indifferent to the nature of the
individuals in the collections, namely, the number of objects in the
collections – a box of chalks and a box of cheese cubes can indeed
have that common attribute or for that matter, share it with a
collection of wedding gifts, no two of which may have anything in
common with each other beyond belonging to that collection. It is a
first step in introducing some order in the chaos that a simultaneous
contemplation of disparate collections entails; and seeking order in
the midst of chaos is surely a search for beauty. Perhaps the
anaesthetic of familiarity – to borrow a phrase from Richard
Dawkin's book “Unweaving the rainbow” – inures us to this beauty.
But the evident pleasure some children take in counting is perhaps
evidence of that beauty.
 Abstraction is at the core of all mathematics: it consists on the
one hand, of the rejection of the irrelevant in an investigation and
on the other hand of recognition of commonalities in apparently
disparate phenomena or situations. Counting, as I pointed out, is an
instance of both aspects of abstraction at play. It took Galileo's
genius to treat friction as irrelevant in the first instance in studying
motion – the crucial step for turning mechanics into a mathematical
discipline.

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 Mathematics, especially pure mathematics is practically all
imagination. The concept of a number in the abstract is, as I
pointed out, the result of a feat of imagination. In geometry, one has
idealisations such as points and lines – one imagines objects of
smaller and smaller dimensions and end up in the idea of a point,
an object of zero dimensions. The word concept itself means
something which has an existence only in our imagination. And
mathematics is all about concepts and their inter-relations, inter-
relations that can be deduced by application of rigourous logical
reasoning. By and large a concept is considered mathematical if it
can be related to concepts that developed from the integers. All of
geometry can be fitted into this paradigm – that was essentially
achieved by Descartes through his analytic geometry. Analytic
geometry essentially converts all problems of geometry into
problems in algebra. Some of the concepts like the ones I
mentioned just now have their inspiration in the world around us,
but there are others that are the result of imagination applied to
other mathematical concepts themselves. The realm of mathe-
matics is thus imagination.
 Whatever its origin, once a concept is introduced into
mathematics, mathematicians find it interesting in itself irrespective
of any meaning it may have outside of mathematics; and a host of
new problems about it, which are the result again of imagination,
become their preoccupation. Gauss, when he declared that
“Mathematics is the queen of all sciences”, went on to add that
“Arithmetic (that is Number Theory) is the queen of mathematics” –
and Number Theory is the area of mathematics that has almost no
contact with the world outside mathematics. The problems in
number theory are mostly generated by internal considerations. And
aesthetics is the guide that dictates the choice of the problem to
pursue from among a myriad possibilities. Let me give you an
example of such a problem and its resolution by Euclid which
requires only a minimal back-ground in mathematics. Most – if not
all – mathematicians consider it a beautiful piece of mathematics; if
you too find it beautiful, your aesthetic sensibilities will find a ready
resonance in the mathematical mind.
 Elementary arithmetic of whole numbers was no doubt born in the
market place. Primitive barter of goods required setting relative
values to commodities such as equating three goats to a cow and
as the markets grew more sophisticated, one needed addition

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subtraction, multiplication an so on to transact business. It is the
market place that triggered the development of all the arithmetic we
learn at school. But already in the second half of the millennium
before Christ, that arithmetic set one foot in the ivory tower in
Greece.
 The notion of a prime crops up as soon as division is introduced:
let me recall that a prime is a positive integer p other than 1 such
that the only numbers that divide it exactly – that is without leaving
a remainder – are 1 and itself. That concept however leaves the
market place cold, but the ivory tower is fascinated. The first few
primes are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13.... Euclid (whose geometry is familiar to
us) raised the following question about prime numbers (in 4th
century BCE):

Is the collection of all prime numbers a finite collection?

He answered the question in the negative: there are infinitely

many prime numbers. I will now proceed to give you his elegant
proof of that assertion. Suppose that the collection P of all primes is
finite. Let p1.p2.p3...pn–1, pn be an enumeration of all the primes (in
P). Let N be the integer p1.p2.p3...pn–1.pn+1. Then N cannot be a
prime since N is greater than all the primes. This means that N is
(exactly) divisible by some integer r with 1 < r < N. Let d be the
smallest of such integers r. Now if d' is a divisor of d, d' will also
divide N (exactly). Since d is the smallest of all the integers, not
equal to 1, dividing N, d' = d or 1. In other words d is a prime. It
must therefore be none of the pi in P. But (unlike d), none of the pi
divide N exactly. In fact all of them leave a remainder 1 when
dividing N. Thus our assumption that P is finite thus leads us to a
contradiction. So P cannot be a finite collection.
 Since Euclid mathematicians have raised and are still raising
(and answering) any number of questions about primes, questions
that have nothing to do with the world outside mathematics.
 Let me give you two more examples of major mathematical
developments that resulted from an internal dynamic rather than
any external stimulus. Pierre de Fermat was a French mathe-
matician of the 17th century. He was an amateur – by profession,
he was a judge in the provincial town of Toulouse in France.
Mathematics was a hobby, but nevertheless a consuming passion
and his work places him among the all-time greats in the history of

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mathematics. He possessed a copy of the book “Diophantus” – an
account of the work of the Greek mathematician of that name –
which he studied avidly making brief notes in the margins. One
such note discovered posthumously was in a page in that book
devoted to Pythagorean triplets, that is triples of positive integers
(a, b, c) such that a2 + b2 = c2. They are called by that name for
obvious reasons – they are the two sides and the hypotenuse of a
right angled triangle. Pythagorean triplets (of integers) abound: in
fact if p, q are any pair of integers (p2 – q2, 2.p.q, p2 + q2) is a
pythagorean triplet. Fermat's note read “On the contrary, it is
impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, a fourth power into
two fourth powers, or, generally any power above the second into
two powers of the same degree. I have a truly marvellous
demonstration (of this) which this margin is too narrow to contain”.
In other words Fermat claimed that if an + bn = cn with a, b, c non-
negative integers and n an integer greater than 2, then a or b is
zero.
 That note was written some time in 1637 but Fermat did not write
down a proof anywhere except for the special case n = 4.
Sometime after Fermat's death, his son brought the marginal note
to the attention of some mathematicians. Professional and amateur
alike became fascinated with the question and generations of
mathematicians tried without success, their hand at proving
Fermat's claim. It defied their ingenuity for some three and a half
centuries till in 1994, Andrew Wiles, a British mathematician
working in Princeton, produced a proof. And that proof used the
vast machinery developed by several leading figures in mathe-
matics over the intervening period, a lot of it in efforts at solving the
Fermat problem or other problems that arose as off-shoots of
attempts at solving it. An entire area known as algebraic number
theory was developed during that period. In the light of this history,
mathematicians now generally believe that Fermat mistakenly
believed that he had a proof when he recorded that note in his copy
of “Diophantus”. Fermat's last theorem is a question that arose out
of pure curiosity about whole numbers. Pythagorean triplets – which
seem to have some nebulous practical connection – were the
trigger for Fermat's imagination in posing the question. But there
the connection with the outside world stops and fascination with
numbers take over.

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 Here is a second episode in the history of mathematics which too
illustrates the role of internal dynamics in the development of
mathematics. We are all familiar with the quadratic equation.
Mathematicians of ancient India knew how to solve the quadratic
equation – the Bakshali manuscript discovered in 1881 near
Peshawar in Pakistan dating back to 4th century CE or before,
bears witness to it. The roots of the quadratic equation
ax2 + bx + c = 0, as we learnt in school, can be expressed in terms
of the coefficients of the equation by performing arithmetical
operations on them and taking square roots as well. The solutions
of the equation ax2 + bx + c = 0 are:

 {–b + (b2 – 4ac)1/2}/2 and {–b – (b2 – 4ac)1/2}/2.

The quadratic equation turns up in diverse practical situations, but

higher degree equations seldom crop up. Nevertheless mathe-
maticians got curious about the cubic equation which yielded its
secrets with some struggle as did the next – the fourth degree
equation. Then began a quest to solve the fifth degree equation and
that went on for some three centuries without any result, with good
reason as it turned out. A young Norwegian Hendrik Abel, in his
early twenties, had the daring imagination to think very differently:
he proved that one cannot express the roots of a general fifth
degree equations in terms of the coefficients using only the
arithmetical operations and extractions of roots of all orders. The
cubic and the biquadratic were already of no great interest to
people outside mathematics, the quintic even less. But mathe-
maticians became obsessed with them. They had to know, to
understand, the quintic. Nor did it stop with the quintic. One wanted
to understand equations of any degree.
 And along came a young man named Evariste Galois from
France to pick up that challenge. Galois developed a brilliant and
comprehensive theory, now known as Galois Theory that could tell
us when a given equation can be solved in the manner in which
equations up to the fourth degree were solved. The general theory
was the result of a purely mathematical quest. Abel and Galois both
died young: Abel at 26 and Galois when he was 21. You cannot
script a more poignant tragedy than the stories of their lives.
 Those are some illustrations to highlight mathematical develop -
ments that are the result of internal concerns with aesthetics as the

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guide. On the other hand Newton's development of Calculus is the
spreme example of mathematics that was inspired and guided by
the world external to it – it was motivated by the urge to understand
motion, planetary movements, in particular. And Calculus and its
off-shoot, Differential Equations have had a symbiotic relationship
with the natural sciences. Even in these cases however,
mathematical developments have followed parallelly a path dictated
by aesthetics. Many of the leading figures of 19th century mathe-
matics spent time perfecting the Calculus, putting it on rigorous
foundations following the Euclidean paradigm.
 It would appear that great mathematicians tend to set greater
store by mathematics that is concerned with its own constructs
rather than mathematics that enlists itself into the service of other
disciplines. Gauss's partiality to Number Theory certainly indicates
that. When admonished by Joseph Fourier, a major figure of
eighteenth century mathematics for pursuing useless mathematics,
his greater contemporary Carl Gustav Jacobi responded with “A
savant like Fourier ought to know that the sole end of science is the
glory of the human mind and under that title, a question about
numbers is worth as much as a question about the system of the
world”.
 All that illustrates the central role imagination plays in mathe -
matics. Yet, in public perception, mathematics is a “dry” subject!
Many people find the discipline demanded by mathematics
forbidding. Euclid's geometry, when first encountered evokes a
sharp reaction: either one of immense pleasure or one bordering on
despair. I would suggest that the former is the natural reaction while
the latter is often the result of the inadequacies of the teacher. The
discipline demanded really amounts to asking one to think, think
logically and once one learns to do that learning mathematics
becomes a pleasurable experience – the discipline becomes
instinctive.
 In every creative endeavour, there is a tension between imagi -
nation on the one hand and discipline on the other. In the natural
sciences or in mathematics applied to them, the discipline is
imposed from outside. A theory seeking to explain a natural
phenomenon has to be in tune with the observations relating to the
phenomenon and that reins in the imagination. But with mathe-
matics, the constraints on imagination are internal: There is of
course the discipline imposed by the exacting standards of rigour in

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reasoning (which I talked about just now). Less widely appreciated
is the other factor, which too I have already talked about:
aesthetics. Not all problems that arise in the study of mathematical
constructs are pursued avidly: one makes a deliberate choice in
favour of those that are seen to be pretty. In this – in that the
discipline is entirely internal – mathematics is closer to the arts than
the sciences.
 As I have already said some mathematics was developed to meet
the needs of other endeavours. But even the mathematical ideas
born of the purely aesthetic impulse, have time and again proved to
be the right tools for apprehending nature, a phenomenon
described pithily by the physicist Wigner as “the unreasonable
effectiveness” of mathematics in the natural sciences. Decarte's
idea of representing points on the plane by a pair of numbers was a
device he introduced to renovate geometry; it was not motivated by
any practical consideration. But graphs today are tools that shed
light on a myriad things – from Physics to Biology to Economics, to
Commerce.... . A lot of sophisticated number theory goes into
modern cryptography, which is vital for information security; and all
that number theory came out of fascination with numbers for their
own sake. Major developments in mathematical analysis, much of it
the result again of curiosity about mathematical concepts, have
been applied to communication problems with tremendous success.
Group theory which was developed largely in the context of Galois
theory, has had a fundamental role in quantum physics. Riemann –
one of the all-time greats in mathematics in – invented what we call
Riemannian geometry, motivated largely by aesthetics but fifty
years after Riemann, it was to provide the right frame work for
Einstein's general relativity. Some of the very sophisticated
Algebraic Geometry developed relatively recently for purely
aesthetic reasons is already being used by physicists.
 Mathematics has been playing an ever increasing role in every
field of human activity. I mentioned some of its intervention in other
areas that effected remarkable progress in them. Biology which
some hundred years ago seemed impervious to mathematics
seems to be using more and more of it, none of which was
developed with Biology in mind. Technology these days uses
mathematics of a very high level of sophistication, mathematics
which was created not so long ago for purely aesthetic reasons. In
recent years business and finance have benefitted immensely from

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the use of sophisticated mathematical ideas of Probability theory.
The work of many of the Nobel Laureates in Economics is
mathematical. There is no gainsaying the all pervasive influence
that mathematics wields on practically ever sphere of human
activity.
 There is another less tangible benefit that mathematics confers
on us. Pursuit of mathematics even at the elementary level helps
develop logical thinking – an asset in any pursuit whatever. The
scientific temper that we want to instill in our people is perhaps best
achieved through teaching mathematics. In any attempt to build a
knowledge society, considerable attention needs to be paid to
mathematics. And of course that means that the first step is to
strengthen our school system to ensure that children are taught
mathematics properly.
 But before I go on to talk about education let me address one
other issue: there is a perception that the “cold logic” of mathe-
matics is the very anti-thesis of sensitivity and so there is some-
thing unfeminine about the pursuit of mathematics. The poet Keats
in one of his poems asks the rhetorical question:

 “Do not all charms fly

 At the mere touch of cold philosophy?”

and later in the same poem, he says:

 “Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,

 Conquer all mysteries by rule and line”

Philosophy means natural philosophy by which term science was

known in Keats's days. As with most sweeping statement of this
kind, it cannot be sustained by any serious evidence. Bhaskara,
one of ancient India's mathematical stars, in his book “Leelavati”
poses mathematical problems in verses full of interesting imagery.
It is perhaps not very well known that Omar Khayyam was a leading
mathematical figure of his times – he did not use poetry in writing
mathematics though. Lewis Carol was the pen-name of the mathe-
matician Rev Dodgson, a don at Oxford. Carol's superb humour is
difficult to match, but a sense of humour is by no means rare to
come by among mathematicians. I may also add that much of Lewis
Carol's sense of humour has its basis in “cold” logic. Sonja

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Kowalevski, another big name in mathematics, was a novelist of
some standing. Henri Poincare , the great French mathematician,
wrote beautifully about mathematics. Hardy's book “A mathe-
matician's apology” is a sensitive, yet unsentimental portrayal of a
mathematician's perceptions of his profession. The role played by
many leading men of mathematics of the 19th century in the fight
against gender prejudice to get Sonja Kowalevski the recognition
she richly deserved makes a heart warming story. And again in the
20th century the great mathematician Hilbert and his colleagues
fought a long, eventually successful, battle against gender prejudice
that kept Emmie Noether, one of the great mathematicians of all
time out of academia for a long time.
 In public perception, the mathematician is an absent minded
creature entirely absorbed in the world of mathematics and
generally devoid of practical commonsense: Professor Calculus of
the Tintin comics is the prototype; better that, I suppose than
Professor Moriarty, Shelock Holme's criminal adversary. There are
no doubt some mathematicians who will fit the Professor Calculus
mould, but not many. On the other hand there is among mathe-
maticians a reasonable smattering of a wide variety of interesting
people as in any other group of professionals. There are flamboyant
characters who attract attention, but there are others as austere as
they come, yet no less interesting. There is this book, “Men of
mathematics” by E T Bell which gives short biographical accounts,
with a little mathematics thrown in, of great mathematicians from
antiquity down to the end of the 19th century. It makes delightful
reading and you will find these people very interesting indeed.
Bell has been rightly criticised for historical inaccuracies and
over-romanticisation; nevertheless, I believe that he captures the
personalities of his subjects very well. Here for you is a gallery of
interesting men of mathematics of the 20th century.
 Hermann Weyl, Carl Ludwig Siegel, Andre Weil, Renee Thom,
Alexander Grothendieck.
 There are many more of course, but these have an Indian
connection and I happen to have had the good fortune of having
met all of them except Weyl.
 Weyl was a renaissance intellectual, as much a physicist as a
mathematician. He has a little book titled “Symmetry” which is a
kind of public outreach for mathematics. Among other things, the
book explores the mathematical basis of aesthetics in visual arts –

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Keats would not have approved! Weyl gifted his entire collection of
the volumes of the journal Mathematische Annalen to TIFR – he
was persuaded to do so by K. Chandrasekharan, the man
responsible for building the School of Mathematics at TIFR.
Minakshisundaram another big name in Indian mathematics worked
on problems closely related to some of Weyl's work.
 Carl Ludwig Siegel is considered one of 20th centuries greatest
mathematicians. He successfully pretended to be mentally unstable
to escape military service in Nazi Germany and left the country as
he could not stomach antisemitism. He returned home after the war
to Gottingen and perhaps thought of himself as a successor to
Gauss. He was baptised Karl with a K which he changed to a C –
apparently after Gauss – which caused considerable difficulty to
archivists looking for a record of his birth in his home village! Siegel
has visited TIFR several times for extended periods of stay. He has
had considerable influence on Indian mathematics.
 Andre Weil is another major figure of the twentieth century. He
spent two years (1930–32) at Aligarh University as Professor and
Head of the department of mathematics. He had a deep interest in
India and was particularly fascinated by Indian philosophical
thought. He refused to do military service during the second world
war – he cited the Bhagawad Gita whose ostensible purpose was to
get Arjuna to fight, for justifying his stand: his “dharma” was the
pursuit of mathematics, not soldiering, however just the cause!
Weil's mathematics has also been a big influence on Indian
mathematics. When he visited India some thirty years after his first
sojourn, his hosts in India included the then president Zakir Hussain
and Dharam Vira, governor of West Bengal, both personal friends
from the Aligarh days!
 Rene Thom was one of the most original topologists of the 20th
century. He embarked on providing a mathematical model for
morphogenesis in biology. For a while his catastrophe theory made
waves and the French media went overboard announcing the
arrival of a French Newton. But his work in topology gives him a
lasting place in the history of mathematics. Though French, his
mathematical style was very different from the predominant
Bourbaki style. Shortly before his retirement he went into
philosophy and on one occasion talking to me he said that he went
into philosophy because mathematics had become too difficult from
him! Thom too has visited India professionally more than once.

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 Alexander Grothendieck is an extraordinary phenomenon. He
began working in functional analysis with Laurent Schwarz,
scarcely meeting his adviser but producing a thesis which was
published as a book and is the last word , a bible on the subject. He
then switched to algebraic geometry where too he effected a
revolution and the agenda he set for the subject 50 years ago is still
the directive force. That agenda was in fact announced at a
confereve in Mumbai in 1968. And then, all of a sudden in 1970, he
decided to quit mathematics which he declared an unimportant
pursuit, faced as humanity was with serious survival problems. He
took to farming failed miserably and kept coming back to acdemia
to earn money with lectures to sustain his farm. He started a journal
called Survive – survival in English – which folded up in a year! He
had a formidable reputation for hard work and when asked by a
colleague if it was true that he worked sixteen hours a day his
response was “No, not every day!”.
 So much about the nature of mathematics. Now let me briefly
indicate where our country stands in the world of mathematics. We
have a long and glorious mathematical tradition. The Pythagoras
theorem was known to our ancestors – it is to be found in the
Baudhayana Sulva Sutra dating back to 7th century before Christ,
some two centuries before Pythagoras. The idea of conferring the
status of a number to zero emanated from India, perhaps as far
back as the 2nd century before Christ. Our present way of
representing numbers by the place value system using the zero is
also of Indian origin and that is arguably the single most important
mathematical discovery in the history of all science – it is at once a
brilliant piece of abstract mathematics and at the same time a
practical tool of the greatest value. This discovery may appear to be
an excellent example of the old adage that necessity is the mother
of invention. But it may well be the result of an aesthetic quest. The
real need for an efficient and economical way of representing
numbers really arises when you have to deal with large numbers.
The Greeks at the time of Alexander and the Persians before them
must have felt that need if only to manage their huge armies; but
they did not arrive at the system. On the other hand ancient India
had a fascination for large numbers – names had been given to
powers of ten up to the eighteenth and beyond – numbers that
would not crop up in any practical context. So it may well have been

17
the aesthetic drive to find a way to write down larger and larger
numbers that may have resulted in this discovery.
 Algebra the manipulation of variable numbers seems also to have
originated in this country. There was no question that through the
middle ages that India was in the lead in the international scene.
Arya Bhata and Brahma Gupta are formidable mathematical
intellects to reckon with. So were the two Bhaskaras. Then there
was a school in Kerala during the 14th and 15th centuries whose
leading figure Madhava had essentially discovered the calculus,
300 years before Newton. And in Ramanuajan we had one of the
greats of the twentieth century.
 All that is good reason for us to believe that our country has
considerable mathematical strength and people at large do seem to
think that. And in fact some of the post Ramanujan work in this
country stands up to the best done anywhere in the world, though
the public at large or even many members of the scientific
community have no awareness of that. On the other hand spurious
claims about so called “Vedic” mathematics unfortunately seem to
have impressed many people.
 Despite this, the negative perceptions about mathematics I
mentioned are also very prevalent. Such perceptions are global,
though and not confined to our country. But one important
contributory factor for the unfavourable perception is the poor
quality of mathematics teaching in our schools. The principal
reasons for this is that, over several decades now, a large number
of our mathematics teachers have been less than competent at
their job. This is of course not a problem which is exclusive to
mathematics. In the rest of this talk, what I have to say will apply to
our education system as a whole.
 The ignorance of many of our teachers, of the subject that they
are supposed to teach, is of, what I call the second order. Not only
do they not know, they do not know that they do not know. With
some others it may not be ignorance but a total lack of enthusiasm
for teaching that is the reason behind their not delivering. The poor
quality of the teaching profession in the country is simply due to the
fact that the pool of applicants for teaching jobs itself has been of
indifferent quality. This has come to pass because, over many
years, the teaching profession has not been an attractive career
option for most bright young people. The surprising thing is that one

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does find more good teachers than you can expect in such a
context.
 The poor emoluments of the teacher is of course an important
factor in rendering the teaching profession unattractive. Other
professions which at one time were behind that of teaching have
since overtaken it, to say nothing of new ones that have cropped up
in the wake of liberalisation of the economy. One sometimes hears
shrill voices about how teachers in government schools are
irresponsible despite good salaries and are not held accountable.
There is no denying that there is a problem there. But I do not quite
understand what is meant by “good salary”. The teacher's
emoluments do not compare favourably with that in many less
demanding professions. A Bollywood star or a cricketer makes
more money out of a two-minute commercial brainwashing our kids
into drinking a cola they do not need, than a teacher charged with
the responsibility of shaping their minds, would in ten lifetimes! Our
society's values and demands for accountability are indeed grossly
skewed.
 Salary is by no means the only reason for the profession being
unattractive. Working conditions in our schools leave a lot to be
desired. The unwieldy sizes of the classes makes even the most
committed teachers loose heart. Even passing on information
effectively to large classes is a daunting task, but in a subject like
mathematics, where you have to convey concepts, the task
becomes close to impossible.
 The workload in terms of the number of hours of teaching is also
in general much too heavy. Teachers need time to prepare their
lessons – even those who have experience of years. Every batch of
students is different and a good teacher would want to device
strategies suitable for them and that needs time. Also it will be the
endeavour of any intelligent person to constantly up-grade one's
own knowledge and that too needs spare time. The teacher has
also other duties apart from teaching – setting and correcting
exams, interacting with parents etc. They are, in government
supported schools, often forced into tasks not related to their
professional responsibilities such as election duties, family planning
work etc.
 The general infrastructure in our schools is of very poor quality.
The physical environment in which they work is often discouraging
in the extreme.

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 Way back in the past, the school teacher found some
compensation to some of the unattractive features of the profession
in the respect accorded to him or her. Our social environment has
come a long way since and that respect has all but vanished.
Respect, in our milieu, seems predicated exclusively on economic
status.
 The buzzword these days is “knowledge society”. Evidently the
first step towards that is the renovation of our education system and
there can be no two opinions on the need for that. If our education
system is to deliver, the crucial thing is to ensure that the work-
force in the system is of good quality. That can be achieved only by
making the teaching profession attractive and sought after by bright
young people. I outlined the various reasons that make youngsters
shun the teaching profession and these problems have to be dealt
with. Emoluments need to be much better than they are – one
needs to think in terms of doubling or tripling them. The student
teacher ratio must come down drastically – classes of not more
than thirty children should be the target. Work-load has to be cut
drastically: anything more than 3 hours of teaching in a day is not
conducive to maintaining good standards. Infrastructure has of
course to be improved by leaps and bounds.
 These suggestions for making teaching an attractive career
option are of course not easy to implement. The financial outlay
needed will perhaps be several times what we spend on education
now. But if it achieves what it sets out, it is well worth the money.
There will of course be many practical difficulties in achieving the
goal even if the money and the political will are available but we
can find solutions to these practical problems. The school teacher is
rendering greater service to us than most other professionals in our
midst and our society should ensure that he or she enjoys a socio-
economic status commensurate with that. Urgent steps are needed
– the problem of quality in education is fast reaching crisis
proportions. Unfortunately even while we talk of building a
“knowledge society”, we do not seem to be paying attention to the
foundations of that edifice. All talk about educational reform is
about curriculum, examination system etc. issues which are
important, but far less so than the problem with human resources.
 Well I am reluctant to end on that grim note. So I will tell you a
nice story about Gauss which involves a school teacher.

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 Gauss as a child displayed unusual intellectual precocity. At age
three he once corrected his father's calculation, when the latter, a
farmer, was distributing wages to his peasants. Gauss was all of
ten when he made his first exciting discovery. It is at that age that
he was formally admitted to a class in arithmetic. Buttner, the
teacher was the kind of lazy sadistic character who inspires the
shrill voices I talked about. When he did not feel like teaching he
set the class an arithmetical problem that was sufficiently tedious
for the kids to be at it no end while he could relax in his chair. On
one such occasion, he asked the children to add up all the whole
numbers between two numbers which were far apart. All the kids
except Carl Friederick laboured hard adding numbers on their
slates. Carl wrote down a number on his slate in two minutes flat
and put it on the master's table and sat back while the rest toiled for
the hour before they too piled up the slates on the table. Carl's was
the only correct answer. He had discovered on the spot the well
known method for summing up arithmetic progressions! Buttner
was stunned, promptly redeemed himself by becoming a humane
teacher at least to the star pupil. Paying out of his own pocket he
acquired the best text book in arithmetic that was available and
presented it to Gauss (who breezed through it no time).
 Moral of the story: Bad teachers are good for spotting incipient
Gausses. New York jewish families, I am told, know better. When
their kid turns ten, the parents set him or her the problem of
summing up an arithmetic progression and wait with bated breath
for two whole minutes!

Thank you for your attention

21
 KUMARI L. A. MEERA MEMORIAL TRUST
(Reg. No. 239 of 28.8.1989)
The Kumari L. A. Meera Memorial Trust was established on 28.8.1989 by Mr.
L. K. Ananthakrishnan in Palghat, Kerala State in memory of his daughter,
Kumari L. A. Meera. The Trust is dedicated to the service of mankind, with a
wide range of activities in the fields of Physics, Mathematics and Computer
Science besides Anthropology, and welfare and charitable activities. The
Trust is managed by a Board of Trustees, the Managing Trustee being Mr.
Ananthakrishnan until his demise in March 1998. The present Managing
Trustee is Prof. V. Balakrishnan.
 The main focus of the Trust is to foster scientific interaction and activity in
the fields of Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science in various scientific
institutions, and encourage scientific education and advanced scientific
research in these and interface areas by providing scholarships/
stipends/awards for meritorious and deserving students. The Trust is
committed to the development of excellence in Physics, Mathematics and
Computer Science. It has instituted awards and scholarships in memory of
Meera in several schools and colleges and has provided financial grants for
upgradation of library, laboratory and computer facilities in a number of
institutions in India. In addition it assists in the promotion of Sanskrit and
traditional cultural values.
 The Trust has instituted awards and prizes for the encouragement of
excellence in Physics in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, St.
Stephen’s College, Delhi, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and other
educational institutions.
 The Trust also organises the Kumari L. A. Meera Memorial Meeting on
Frontier areas in Physics. The first meeting in the series, on the topic
“Geometry and Topology in Physics”, was held at Dhvanyaloka, Mysore from
February 8 to 14, 1996. The second meeting, on “Chaos, Complexity and
Information” was held from February 1 to 7, 1997; the third on “Optics:
Modern Trends” from January 31 to February 5, 1998; the fourth on
“Probability and Physics” from January 25 to January 30, 1999; the fifth on
“Soft Condensed Matter” from January 27 to February 2, 2000; the sixth on
“Physics of Biological Systems” from February 1 to 8, 2001; and the seventh
on “Quantum Information and Quantum Computation” from January 30 to
February 5, 2002; all at the same venue. The eighth meeting on “Astro-
physical, Geophysical and Atmospheric Fluid Dynamics” was held at the
Centre for Learning, Bangalore from January 3 to January 7, 2003. The
ninth meeting on “Some Aspects of Quantum Mechanics” at the same
venue from 2 to 6, 2005; and the tenth meeting on “Topics in Optics, A
Classical Selection” was held at the Centre for Learning, Bangalore
December 25–31, 2008.

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 The Kumari L. A. Meera Memorial Lectures

N. Mukunda – ‘The Task of Picturing Reality’ (1990)

V. Radhakrishnan – ‘Flying Slowly’ (1993)
G. Venkataraman – ‘Parallel Computers’ (1994)
V. S. Ramamurthy – ‘Molecules to Materials –
The novel transition domain of
Clusters and Nano Structures’ (1995)
J. V. Narlikar – ‘Myths, Beliefs and Facts in
Astronomy’ (1996)
D. Balasubramanian – ‘Expanding Visions of the
New Biology’ (1997)
S. Ramanan – ‘The Role of Groups in Arts
and Sciences’ (1998)
R. Rajaraman – ‘Can Relativity and Quantum
Mechanics Co-exist?’ (1999)
S. R. Shetye – ‘The Indian Summer Monsoon
and the Waters around India’ (2000)
S. M. Chitre – ‘Windows on the Sun’s Interior
and Exterior’ (2001)
Vijayalakshmi Ravindranath – ‘Life and the Brain’ (2002)
P. K. Kaw – ‘Hymn to Agni the God of Fire’ (2003)
Sunil Mukhi – ‘The Dual World of Science’ (2004)
Sushanta Dattagupta – ‘The Myth about Einstein’ (2005)
J. N. Goswami – ‘Origin of the Solar System:
Our Present Understanding’ (2006)
M. S. Ananth – ‘The Changing Environment of Higher
Education and Some India –
Centric Concerns’ (2007)
P. Balaram – ‘Chemical Analysis in the Age
of Biology’ (2008)

Special Kumari L. A. Meera Memorial Lectures

R. Chidambaram – ‘Nuclear Energy and Safety’ (1996)

D. D. Bhawalkar – ‘Laser Applications in Medicine’ (1998)

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24
Sri L. K. Ananthakrishnan Memorial Lectures

V. Rajaraman – ‘Video on Demand’ (1999)

G. Srinivasan – ‘The Present Revolution in
Astronomy’ (2001)
A. K. Raychaudhuri – ‘Wonderful world of oxides:
From art to modern Technology
and frontier science’ (2001)
A. K. Sood – ‘Carbon Nanotubes:
Fun unlimited’ (2002)
N. Panchapakesan – ‘Symmetry Breaking and Our
Presence in the Universe’ (2003)
Deepak Mathur – ‘Matter under extreme stress:
from molecules to cells’ (2004)
Rohini M. Godbole – ‘The Heart of Matter’ (2005)
Alladi Sitaram – ‘Harish-Chandra:
A Mathematician's Mathematician’ (2008)
Vidyanand Nanjundiah – ‘Origin of Species after 150 years’ (2009)

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Eighteenth Kumari L. A. Meera Memorial Lecture

The Queen of Sciences: Her Realm,

Her Influence and Her Health

by

M. S. Raghunathan
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Mumbai

December 3, 2009

Kumari L. A. Meera Memorial Trust

Palghat, Kerala

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