We are now in the second week of Ramadhan 1446. Alhamdulillah, I am able to fast once more. I hope this Ramadhan will make me much a better person. My sons, Ihsan and Izhar came back home to spend some time with us, but they sort of miss each other.
I have just updated my Malay blog with a post on the International Year of Quantum Science & Technology. I wanted to do a better post, but the progress made in quantum technology is too much for me to read and cover. In a way, I miss those days when we have group meetings and we sort of shared what we read almost weekly. You can read some of the development here: Harnessing the power of the second quantum revolution. Preskill who coined the term Noisy and Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) has also recently come with another visionary talk: Beyond NISQ: The Megaquop Machine. In many ways, I wish I could be part of the mainstream efforts in pursuing QST locally (as my friend from a neighbouring country said), but I think those days are over. I will stand on the sidelines and watch how things unfold.
Myself will be going back to basics. I will be joining back XMUM to do part-time teaching and tutoring in basic calculus, this coming April, God willing. In a way, it coincided well with what I have been posting in my technical blogs (see previous post): going back to analysis. This is a topic that I certainly have gaps and holes in understanding during my younger years of studying. At the current age, I may not delve too deeply in it but just wished had opportunities to learn it better. For those who wanted to learn what was taught in XMUM, can look at L.P. Teo's two volumes of notes here and here. I also remembered reading a quote of Dirac in his interaction with Salam on algebraic and analytic approaches as if the former is easier. It was mentioned in the book in Ideals and Realities, but I have lost my copy of the book to ascertain what was being said. Indeed, I do remember the part of canonical group quantization that I find the hardest to learn and do during my PhD work is Mackey's orbital analysis. I had to pick up the two-volume Warner's Harmonic Analysis (see here and here), to understand things. Wished I had these two books with me just for those memories, but they are way too expensive. But what I will be teaching soon (God willing) is much more basic, even my three legged cat is learning them.
