Varia: Abel Prize and Physics Seminar

Yesterday, the recipients of 2021 Abel Prize were announced. It went to Avi Wigderson and Laszlo Lovasz. I almost forgotten about the announcement until my student posted it in WhatsApp. I was probably driving home from work when the announcement went live. As I reached home, I was resting mostly, due to a bad back. Quanta has a good description of their work here. Wigderson's field is perhaps a distant away from what I normally read. Lovasz, on the other hand, works in graph theory and I have come across his work while I was looking into the minimal set of Kochen-Specker vectors. I stumbled into this computer solution made by Arends. Further search along this topic, led me to Lovasz, Saks and Schrijver paper on "Orthogonal Representations and Connectivity of Graphs" (see correction here). This is as close as I can get to the work of Abel Laureate, Lovasz. For the work of Wigderson, there is a draft of his book "Mathematics and Computation" available here. There is this interview of Lovasz conducted by Wigderson himself back in 2011, which is interesting to watch. Anyway, congrats to them both.

Today, we had organized the first Seminar Jabatan Fizik under my watch. I guess being enthusiastic about it, we announced this seminar publicly, way too publicly, I guess. We were not expecting any form of trouble but we wanted to make the talk available as widely as possible. The talk is given by Dr. Yap Yung Szen on the topic of quantum computers (see poster below and I have to thank Shela for this). I got to know Dr. Yap from social media and through his article in a local newspaper on which I wrote a blog post (which he read, rather embarrassingly). So we communicated privately and thought we ought to discuss more on quantum technology and what he did. At present, he is the only Malaysian I know who works on quantum computing technology experimentally. He collaborates with Prof. Kitagawa in Osaka University and Prof. Rainer Dumke in CQT.

When the talk started, we saw some unfamiliar names in the participant list, but we did not bother in the beginning and we pretty much let everyone in. Along the way, some of them started to unmute their mikes and interfere briefly the seminar with inappropriate sounds. They also gave rude and vulgar remarks in the chatbox. Had to remove them from the event. Was slightly annoyed, but I tried not to get myself too perturbed by these childish behaviour. Certainly it would have been a better event/day without them around. Not sure of what their intentions were, but whatever cheap thrills they were having, I think they could have used their time better, playing games or whatever they are preoccupied with in their life, rather than disturbing other people who would actually ignore them. Anyway, I have got all of these on record, since initially I wanted to make the talk available to those who can't make it to the event. However, the recording had the speaker's audio quality being poor. So for now, I just make the recording available only to my group. Below is a pic taken by our Head of Department of the seminar.

For the future talks, we will not make them open and restrict the talks to our known colleagues. So you can thank them for not making future talks available.