Varia: Undo Stereotyping

This is my second (physical) attempt of writing this post - mentally, been running several versions in my head, mainly about personal stories of battling stereotypes. Finally, I would keep the post simple and my preference has always been to look into the future rather than caught in the past.

Earlier this week, my sister-in-law and her husband dropped by at our house, on their way to Kuala Lumpur for an appointment with IJN (National Heart Institute). The husband earlier had complications due to heart infection but was later diagnosed with heart problems with one of the valves no longer functioning. He is due to be warded this weekend and may undergo some procedures on the following Monday. Here are some pictures.

That night itself, I was informed about an online meeting on a planned activity on quantum science & technology, which eventually prepares us for the International Year of Quantum Science & Technology in 2025. I did highlight the event in my FB post dated April 15, 2023. Not much excitement when I first posted this, perhaps it was a distant away. Later, I was told by my ex-student, that someone is planning for an event. So, the meeting was a follow-up to the idea. The proposal seems to be conjured at a group level but yet involving the general public. Some of us thought that it would have been better to get an established organization to (co-) organize the event so that it has a better public appeal. This probably have made the planned idea a bit bigger and the suggestion was made not to sideline the original proposer. It is usually harder to get an established organization to agree to help organize the event without having them involved at the very beginning. I had some experience of that with EQuaLS in the past and I was a bit naive then. We were soliciting support from an organization (in fact, two organizations, one of governmental organization and another from a national industry) for a more steady funding for EQuaLS. Below are letters of support from the late Prof. S. Twareque Ali and the late Prof. Paul Busch; we had five other support letters from well-known internationally reputed scientists in the area. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful, perhaps due to the nature of the event is very much an academic one and it might have seemed that the request is coming from only a single institution.

Despite so, the present proposal of planned activity has (the potential of) greater public exposure that might be of interest to the established organization. Worse come to worst, we can always fall back to the group-level activity that would have less public appeal. In any case, I wish the organizer the best - I will provide whatever support I can.

On Wednesday this week, I had another final exam for the other subject I'm teaching (i.e. Electrodynamics 1) and the venue is at a bigger exam hall. So I was up early to make sure that I was 40 minutes earlier before the exam, as suggested by the admin. Well, I arrived rather too early before anyone was there.

To be frank, this subject was one that I was least comfortable with teaching the subject. It would have better for someone who has more engineering outlook to teach the subject. In any case, I learned quite a bit especially in understanding some aspects of materials interacting with electromagnetic waves. The subject itself is pretty much classical with lots of uses of vector calculus. While I understand that the students had much exposure to vectors before, I thought it would be useful for them to know index notation to help prove many general vector identities. I guess some did not like it and considered this elementary (why learn another tool when you have the ordinary tools that one had before). I did explain to one student that index notation is very much used in theoretical physics, particularly if one goes into more advance stuff say those found in relativity and particle physics. Perhaps thinking that what I have taught being too simple for the students, I went for more advanced stuff in the other subject I'm teaching (Mathematical Methods in Physics 1). This course begins with complex analysis and then the latter topics were special functions, integral transforms and partial differential equations, which are not quite covered by the text book I have adopted (from a list of suggested books). I thought I should find a book that continues with the complex analysis theme through the above mentioned topics mentioned. Two books that I find that do this are Harold Cohen's "Mathematics for Scientists & Engineers" and James P. Keener's "Principles of Applied Mathematics". Since the former is out of print and would be difficult for the students to find, I adopted the latter. Unfortunately, the book is targeted at graduate students and I had to unpack some of the topics in a way accessible to the undergraduates. Not sure if they find this useful but I did put in a lot of efforts to cover some of the useful topics. Part of this experimentation is to show that I had the mantle to cover such advanced topics (not to be stereotyped as one that can't teach advanced subjects). So, I don't know ....

Today, I went to fetch my youngest from Jasin. His class finishes at noon and thereafter we rushed back to Seremban to catch our Friday prayers. Fortunately Masjid Hussain began the Friday sermon slightly later and we were in time. We had a light lunch after Fridays at Belqis Restaurant.