Second Week of Shawwal 1446

It has been two weeks since the 'Eid celebrations but in Malaysia, they say we 'celebrate' 'Eid for a month. So what has happened since? Well, I have started teaching since 3rd of Shawwal. The photo below showed the (empty) lecture room where I had my first class.

Since then, I have already given a few more lectures and conducted a few tutorials. I certainly hope that I teach better. During the weekends, we are out for 'Eid visits. I met my brother Nordin who had just came back from Kedah on the Saturday the week before.

I hope to see more of my family side later this coming weekend. Next, we went to my sister-in-law's place in Bandar Tun Hussein Onn.

This weekend, my other half and our eldest went to her brother's place in Taman Melawati and sister's place in Keramat. I did not go and stayed home with my youngest who is havig a fever. I also wanted to do some work. But here are some pics of what I have missed.

What did I work on? I'm supposed to work on my lectures but instead I did work on a blog post on Kashiwara's winning the Abel Prize. The post was only uploaded a few hours ago. Due to technicality of Kashiwara's research, I spent a lot of of time trying to understand his work. When the news of the award was made, I thought the name Kashiwara seems familiar. Then I realised that I have his book.

I never got to read the book beyond the first few pages as the materials are dense and very technical, framed in the language of sheaves. I am aware that my own PhD supervisor use such language in his book on Twistor Geometry and Field Theory. But I never got to use it or even learn it properly. This was however the type of mathematics that I wanted to learn and never gave up the hope of learning them one day (despite my old age). I have been pushing my group and my own self to get acquainted with such highly technical level of mathematics as part of my long term dream. 

I have always asked myself why is it that we have never been exposed to these (abstract) ideas. Even the normal route of theoretical physics was only made known to me during the last two years of my undergraduate studies. At the end of my undergraduate Honours year, I thought I wanted to pursue supergravity but later I discovered that I have a deep desire of learning more abstract ideas. I remembered seeing Witten's article shown in the pic below and was fantasizing that I could one day master such level of mathematics and perhaps create opportunities for our local community to learn them.

Back to Kashiwara; he is home grown to the internationally prestigious Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Kyoto. Back in Cambridge, I was already aware of their publication Publ. RIMS with articles of Michio Jimbo and others. I have always thought that there is some distinct flavour of mathematical physics that such Japanese researchers associated to the institute are pursuing. At some point, when I was involved in the mathematics institute in my former university, I imagined, or rather fantasized, that we could do the same, with our institute having distinctive features. I was encouraging reserach of pure mathematics and mathematical physics, without taking away anything from those who are working on the applied side. Even when I was part of the editorial team of a local mathematics journal, I was imagining that we could produced something similar to Publ. RIMS. We were already having a lot of pure mathematics submissions, mostly from abroad but we were having difficulties getting the appropriate referees given our small network of pure mathematicians. When I took the chief editorship of the journal, I barred my own students from publishing there, to avoid conflict of interests. This makes the goal even harder to achieve. It is unfortunate that we don't have a good pool of pure mathematicians and mathematical physicists locally to truly evolve the distinctive features of mathematical science research that I hoped for. I realised it will take at least one more generation (if not more) to achieve this dream. We need more theoretical research to balance out whatever strength from the applied sciences. It is not going to help if there is a lot of discouragement from within for those who wanted to delve in the theoretical research. The task is already hard by itself to build a sizable pool of theoretical scientists. I hope the younger generation has better chances to do this. Perhaps there will be a slow change ... Allah knows best.