Ramadhan 1446 Varia

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 fasting 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 was 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 in quantum S&T here: Harnessing the power of the second quantum revolution. Preskill who coined the term Noisy and Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) has also recently come up 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 that I had opportunities to learn it better. For those who wanted to know what was taught in XMUM, they 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 of 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 was Mackey's orbital analysis. I had to pick up the two-volume Warner's Harmonic Analysis (see here and here), to understand things better. Wished I had these two books with me just for those memories, but they are way too expensive. What I will be teaching though (God willing) is much more basic, even my three legged cat is learning them.