Trip to Dumaguete City, Philippines

Haven't posted anything here for awhile. I have been busy, with me still managing pain from my frozen shoulder. I got it some weeks before the trip to Philippines and was hoping it to go away (or at least the pain lessened) before the trip. The pain did not subside until now, but let me retell the story of my trip to Philippines.

The idea of going to Philippines was mooted by Prof. Jinky Bornales during the visit of her delegation to UPM way back in March (see photos here). Immediately after her return, I received an invitation letter from Prof. Marc Nolan P. Confessor to a conference their Physical Society (Samahang Pisika Ng Visayas At Mindanao)  is organizing. Now, that's quick and to which I also responded swiftly by booking an air ticket to Manila and on their part from Manila to Dumaguete City where the conference is held.

Just a few days before my flight there, learned about the typhoons Sarika and Haima that may hit Philippines. As usual, there is safety concern (particularly from my family) about me flying there. I tracked updates on the typhoon Haima (nearer to my date of light) which eventually developed into a super typhoon category 5. It did land on Philippines but it was in the north, causing severe damage (see here). Later after the conference, I found out from some of the organizers about their traumatic experience of severe storms and floods.

I flew to Manila on 19 October and the flight was delayed but smooth. At the airport, Christine (official attache of MSU-IIT in Manila) was waiting for me and we drove to pick up Prof. Bornales who was there in Manila to present some proposals. Later, we drove to the hotel through quite a sticky Manila traffic. I was put up at Cherry Blossom Hotel which is nearby the MSU-IIT's office in Manila. It was right in the middle of a shopping area. After freshening up, we walked to a nearby restaurant to have a (salad) dinner.

Despite being tired, woke myself at 3 am in order to get breakfast at 4 am so that we can beat the traffic to the airport. At Manila airport, I met some of Prof. Bornales' friends who were also travelling to Dumaguete City for the conference. The flight was only an hour and at Dumaguete City airport we were picked up by some staff of the conference organizer. We were all put up at the Bethel Guest House, a Christian hotel. This hotel is situated right in front of a beach (see below) - despite so, I didn't have time to walk along the beach though.

We then rushed to the Conference venue just in time for the plenary session. The first talk I listened to was from Prof. Maria Victoria Carpio-Bernido on "SHS STEM Research Initiatives: Plans and Prospects".

First let me mention that I first met Prof. M.V. Carpio-Bernido together with her husband Prof. Christopher Bernido, way back in 1997 in a conference organised by Prof. S.C. Lim who was with UKM then. I knew them both as mathematical physicists who worked with path integrals. Little did I know what else they do. They were initially based in University of the Philippines, Diliman with the National Institute of Physics there. But they then moved to a remote place in Jagna, Bohol in a way to prove a point that they believe in with respect to scientific progress, regradless of how remote one can be. Their tale had me inspired. They founded Central Visayan Institute Foundation (CVIF) and work with schoolchildren and form also a Research Centre for Theoretical Physics. You can read about them here (see video here). In her talk, she spoke about the progress of the CVIF Dynamic Learning Program where schoolchildren are given more room to do activity-based scientific exploration than the usual school program. One of the striking things being mentioned that this program imposes strictly no homework rule. One can read about this program in the slides of their talks given elsewhere here and here. She also lamented the case of Philippine universities not making it to the world universities ranks in comparison to the other South East Asian countries. I can see that from responses to her talk that they are very serious about making holistic progress of science in the country.

The other four plenary talks that I attended that morning were:

• Dr. Rommel G. Bacabac (Univ. of San Carlos, Cebu City), "Teacher's Guide for General Physics I"
• Prof. Ludwig Streit (Universidade de Madeira, Portugal), "Complexity, Acceleration, Globalization - A Challenge for Democracy"
• Prof. Josef Froelich (Innovation Systems Tech Gate Vienna, Austria), "Increasing Dynamics and Complexity of Socio-Technical Systems:New Scientific Methods and Tools Are Needed"
• Dr. Micheal Francis Ian G. Vega II (National Institute of Physics, Univ. of the Philipines, Quezon City), "Einstein and the Music of the Spheres"

The first talk is on the changes they have made to upper secondary school curriculum in a way the transition to university-level physics is easier (at least that is how I understood it). Prof. Streit's talk is based on his paper in Interdisciplinary Studies of Complex Systems. The gist is about the impact of information technology and globalization in our socio-economic systems, which has become highly non-trivial. The call is to study them as complex systems with all the known tools.

Continuing on the same theme is Prof. Josef Froelich on the need of new tools to analyse complex systems - this includes complex networks. Prof Frolich is in fact a student of Prof. Streit.

I have limited interactions with Prof. Froelich since he left for another meeting the next day nd his invitation I believe fits the purpose of Prof. Bornales' office involvement in innovation centres. Prof. Streit, on the other hand, I get to know him better as the conference went along. In fact, Prof. Streit has been there in Philippines several times as visiting professor. The next speaker was Dr. M.F.I.G. Vega II who spoke about gravitational waves. He gave a very lucid lecture and probably got the attention of the school kids there. It is from his talk that I thought I should change my own slides to include more introductory things.

The rest of the afternoon was parallel sessions. I was accompanied by Jingle B. Magallanes since lunch time. I was asked to attend the materials science session and had thus a glimpse of what they do there. The session I was in seems very much be applications in medical sciences. Here is a photo of me having lunch in the Siliman University's gym with Dr. Pawel Sokolowski (from Poland), Prof. Rosario Reserva, Prof. Jinky Bornales and Prof. Josef Froelich. Note: the gym used to be a hangar.

During the night we had the banquet dinner of the conference at the same place. I was seated with Prof. Jinky Bornales, Dr. Pawel Sokolowski, Prof. Christopher Bernido and Prof. Maria Victoria Carpio-Bernido.

One of my difficulties when travelling abroad is my restrictive diet. Being Muslim, of course I take halal food and most Muslims would go for seafood option as it is the easiest. I can't even do this since I don't take white meat i.e. chicken, fish and other seafood. Thus, my easiest option has been a vegetarian when travelling abroad. Sometimes to my embarrassment I had to explain my diet and my worry is always that it may cause unnecessary trouble for the organisers. Anyway the dinner was interesting because they had trivia (they had this also during the conference sessions before they start) and their own students performing. Perhaps a highlight of the dinner is that the Governer of Negros Oriental came down to meet us at dinner.

After dinner, struggled a bit to change and edit my slides.

The second day started off early with the following talks:

• Dr. Mark Nolan P. Confesor (MSU-IIT), "Teaching Guide for General Physics 2 in the K12 Program: Content and Competencies"
• Myself (INSPEM, UPM), "Symplectic Geometric Techniques for r-Qubit Systems"
• Prof. Christopher Bernido (Research Centre for Theoretical Physics, Central Visayan Institute Foundation), "Feynman Paths and White Noise Analysis for Complex Systems with Memory"

Dr. Confesor is the SPVM President and he continues from where Dr. Bacabac left on the talk n the first day. For my own talk, I dwell a little bit on the basics of symplectic geometry expressed in a way I understand them and connects quickly with the idea of quantum states. That leaves me little time to talk about the results we (me and Dr. Saeid Molladavoudi) have produced and in the end I just had to gloss over them (was not satisfied with the way I did it - though should have explained more on the physics of it). Then I asked for some extended time for me to introduce UPM and INSPEM. The ones probbly that caught their eye most is the facts and figures of our undergraduates and postgraduates, which I got from this page. They were amazed by the number of our postgraduates (from interactions during lunch) and I told them it is the requirement of research university to have many postgraduate students. I also told our internationalization efforts from the institute, namely with EMS and MICEMS. After me, it was Prof. Bernido's talk on Feynman path integrals and how they can be used to model complex systems and in a way as technical as my talk (trying not to feel too bad)

For the parallel sessions, I attended the Complex Systems session and listened to a few talks in particular that of Prof. Streit on "Polymers and Random Walks", right after which I had to get some rest, feeling a bit fatigue. 

In the evening, we had another social dinner in which there were games for the staff and speakers. Participated in the light ones - to be sporting - including karaoke session. There, they saw for the first time Prof. Streit and Prof. C. Bernido singing (see pics below).

I decided to go along with the singing particularly then I had just received the news of our budget and the budget cuts of the universities (said to myself, what the heck). I picked Hoobastank's "The Reason".


They were surprised by my choice. I guess they were expecting me picking an oldie with less rockish flavour. In another dinner the day after, I explained my music inclinations and again they were surprised by this fact. I told them, it also surprises many of my own local colleagues.

The next day was a half day with plenary session in the morning and social visit in the afternoon. The talks were:

• Dr. Jan Mickelle V. Maratas (Blaise Pascal University/MSU-IIT), "Some Highlights From LHCb"
• Dr. Stephane Monteil (Blaise Pascal University, France), "High Energy Physics: An Overview of the Field"
• Dr. Pawel Sokolowski (Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland), "Liquid Feedstock Plasma Spraying as an Alternative for Conventional Powder Plasma Spraying"

The first two (see their pic - forefront - in the first picture of the social dinner) are high energy physicists, the earlier is actually the PhD student of the latter. Dr. Maratas spoke about CP violation and Dr. Monteil more generally on the big questions of high energy physics. I braved myself to put forward my questions to these speakers as I would like to know the latest development. Finally Dr. Sokolowski (praised to be one of the bright young scientist in Poland) spoke about his contributions in plasma spraying which has many applications.

In the afternoon, we were given a tour of the Siliman University. Some photos before the tour:

Around the campus:

The photo just above shows one of the earliest building of the Siliman University, which is just nearby a beach. While there is no photo, one of the most interesting place is their anthropology museum. We also stopped by the cultural village foe the island and had some traditional food there.

Finally on the way back, we saw the locals' preparations for the Buglasan Festival (see below). There were a lot of music and sows around the street (only saw a small early portion of it).

All in all, I must say there are many similarities between their conference and ours. We are very much tradition bound. They opened their sessions in the morning with (Christian) prayers and singing their national anthem just like we do in our official functions. They also give out certificates and tokens (and recited a standard text during the conference), which is good for documentation purposes.

Finally, I am attracted with the idea of having school children to be part of the conference (with their own specialised sessions) as a way of attracting students to physics (and other sciences). Here is a pic of me with students during the closing session (there were others before that, that I didn't get the chance to have copies).

Before flying back home to Kuala Lumpur the next morning, had breakfast with Prof. Streit, Prof. Bornales and Dr. Confesor. We talked about possible cooperation. The flight to Manila was just before 9am and reached Manila airport about an hour later. Finally boarded the flight back to KLIA at 3.30 pm and reached home at about 7 pm.

Ranking Mania

Once I have attended a workshop by Kevin Downing who told us, despite what we think of university rankings, we will not be able to ignore them simply because of public opinion is centred around them. Thus, the involvement of our universities in the rankings. My own views on the matter have always been not to ignore them but cautiously use them for our own progress. The rankings are after all one-dimensional projections (hence allowing ordering in mathematical sense) and are not designed to capture the total worth of an organization. I don't really pay attention to the individual ranking number too much but the magnitude of the number will probably signify similar class of universities.

First and foremost,  there are probably more than 30,000 universities in the whole world, most of which are unranked. Now ranked universities are probably in the magnitude of one or two thousand. The number of ranked universities could also vary from year to year and thus this may spoil temporal rank comparison.

Next, there are many different university rankings, each with different ranking criteria. Kevin mentioned the big three:

• Shanghai-Jiaotung Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)  which began in 2003
• Quacquarelli Symonds World University Ranking (QS-WUR)
• Times Higher Education World University Ranking (THE-WUR)

The latter two actually began together in 2004 but they went separate ways in 2009 for which QS decided to use Scopus database while THE uses Thomson-Reuters database. I follow at least another ranking for cross check namely

• Centre for World University Rankings (CWUR), which is based in Jeddah and began in 2012.

QS & THE rankings involve academic peer review while ARWU and CWUR claim they are purely data-based. With different criteria and input dataset, certainly the rankings they produced will be different and it is interesting to see the way they differ. On the surface, I would prefer those without the peer review, which tends to be subjective.

Our local universities seem to have favoured the QS rankings and perhaps prepared well according to their criteria. Hence better performance for our local universities. This is our recent QS rankings:

• Universiti Malaya - ranked 133
• Universiti Putra Malaysia - ranked 270
• Universiti Teknologi Malaysia - ranked 288
• Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia - ranked 302
• Universiti Sains Malaysia - ranked 330

UPM made a substantial leap of 61 spots (from 331st position) bringing it to within top 300 but I consider we made the same leap as UTM (from 303rd position). Next came the QS ranking of Top 50 universities under 50:

• Universiti Putra Malaysia - ranked 17
• Universiti Teknologi Malaysia - ranked 25
• Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia - ranked 26
• Universiti Sains Malaysia - ranked 33

We have also made some achievements in Reuters top innovative university rankings:

• Universiti Putra Malaysia - ranked 73
• Universiti Malaya - ranked 75

The breakdown for UPM marks is given here.

All these improvements are very much welcomed. One can see our university staff committed in helping the university to improve but much more meaningful is the research culture  and the science we build that have improved over the years.

Having these results, we should not go over our heads with such improvement and achievements. Once we accept rankings, we should accept them even if we are not doing good. If we pick and choose, it may not reflect us that well. Just several days after all these good news, THES came out with their rankings and they gave

• Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
• Universiti Putra Malaysia
• Universiti Sains Malaysia
• Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
• Universiti Teknologi Petronas

all ranked within 601-800 category. Universiti Malaya seems conspicuously missing from it (I do not know why) and we noticed Universiti Teknologi Petronas is placed within the same rank as the other research universities. When I first highlighted these results, I guess some are unhappy. But as I said, if one accepts QS ranking, one ought not ignore the other rankings on what they say. The very least we need to see is what they have analysed, why are the ranking results different and in what way can we improve from them. In any case, I find the ranking is consistent with the other rankings. For the CWUR 2016 rankings, we have the following list:

• Universiti Malaya - ranked 539
• Universiti Sains Malaysia - ranked 694
• Universiti Putra Malaysia - ranked 832

Note that CWUR has not been highlighted in any of our media probably due to it being lesser known. It is interesting however to see the score for UPM for which we scored well in the patent criterion, and this further supports the Reuters top innovative ranking results. Now for the ARWU ranking, UPM didn't get to be ranked but the following universities are ranked as 401-500:

• Universiti Malaya
• Universiti Sains Malaysia
• Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

UPM has at least been ranked 151-200 in 2015 for the Mathematics subject ranking. We are looking forward to the 2016 subject ranking, whether we are able to maintain this ranking. Note that both CWUR and ARWU rankings are harder. ARWU ranking for instance, considers alumni of the university that wins the Nobel Prize and Fields Medal as one of the criteria.

As I said earlier, I would rather look at these rankings as tools. One ought to be careful of how we think about them. If top rankings are being made into ultimate goals, they can lead to undesirable and unethical behaviour; ends justify the means mode. The ultimate goals should be those of more noble and intrinsic nature.

We had already seen one academic scandal earlier where local academics duplicated and manipulate images from their experiments to be sent as three different papers:

• https://forbetterscience.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/triplicated-paper-with-multiplicated-cells-and-images/ 

Recently, a bit less severe is the accusation of salami slicing results into multiple papers:

• https://scholarlyoa.com/2016/09/13/two-more-scholarly-super-achievers/

Why is this happening is simply because of the terrible pressure that an academic experiencing today to the extent that some resort to manipulative means and worse, deceit to achieve their key performance indicators and at times unnatural demands. Part of these are indeed fueled by the university's desire to achieve better rankings. One should really reflect the kind of academic ethos that we are trying to build. Let's try to keep good academic ideals while trying to achieve better rankings. The rankings are not permanent, but the science we do is.

Spectra of Academics

There is always an urge in me to defend the academics, not simply because I am one but because of the weight of responsibilities that they carry. The traditional responsibilities of research, teaching and supervision are more than enough to fill up (multiples of) the lifetime of an academic. In the contemporary setting of a modern academic, there are now further expectations of taking up duties on industrial relations, community engagements and even income generation. All these should be handled with care and wisdom. Thus, it saddens me when others are trying to put down the academics.

In the midst of the frenzy of duties and activities that the academics need to cover, it is sometimes a relief for us to return to the (comfort zone of) traditional setting and entertain our intellectual playfulness. We got to do this when Prof. Kalyan B. Sinha visited us at the institute. Earlier, I was surprised to receive his email stating his intent to visit the institute after he attends the Quantum Probability conference in Kuantan. He actually knew personally the late Prof. S. Twareque Ali and was saddened by his departure. After looking up his profile and research work, I was more than happy and honoured to invite him. So he was at the institute on 27-29 August 2016. We took the opportunity to organize a half-day seminar to coincide with his visit (see http://einspem.upm.edu.my/smp2016/). He gave very good introductory lectures on stochastic Schrodinger/Heisenberg dynamics and non-commutative geometry (his slides are available here). Further glimpse of his clear and lucid way of explaining technical materials can be found in his books  here and here. Below are some pics of his visit:

At the end of his visit, I told him that I wish that I had known him earlier so that we could interact and possibly collaborate since there are overlaps of interests.

Talking about collaborations, my attitude has always been very open to invitations within constraints. I rarely decline and am usually honoured to work with good scientists. It is only if it's too distant away from my interest that I will excuse myself or the other party does not really want to collaborate or consider me of much too low a stature. In the latter, I tend to shy away from the person. Currently, I'm in the midst of making possible collaborations with a regulatory body to do complex networks research. The initiative came from Prof. Maman Djauhari, ex-fellow of the institute. The discussion had began last year but negotiations were only finalized recently, but Prof. Maman was already leaving the institute. In a small farewell function, he gave a speech (see pic below). It was during his speech that I learned that Prof. Maman took group theory classes by the legendary Alexander Grothendieck and also Jorga Ibrahim was his lecturer whom he held in high regards. I remember that we had the opportunity of inviting Prof. Jorga Ibrahim to deliver lectures on deforemation quantization in ITMA through the suggestion of Freddy Zen. It was a great honour to have him (and at that time with John Stillwell), way back in 2004.

Fast forward to this week, I found myself again concerned with how blanket expectations on academics, regardless of the field he or she is in. This can be bad particularly when mathematicians/theoreticians have always different research, publication and citation culture. Decision makers and managers must be made fully aware of these differences. Below, I give some links to some statements and studies being made on research culture of mathematics:

• American Mathematical Society statement on rate of publications for mathematics.
• SIAM news on patterns of collaborations in mathematics.
• Peter Hall on measuring performance in mathematics and statistics.
• International Mathematical Union report on citation statistics.
• THES report on citation averages by fields.

Much like the social scientists had fought against the use of metrics of hard sciences in their fields, mathematicians and theoreticians will do well united in highlighting the above.

Innovation Day: Internationalization and Multidisciplinary Opportunities

Today we had our annual event of Innovation Day for the institute. This is the day where we get to honour the high achievers (and the ex-staff) of the institute and we renew our pledge for the institute. This is probably my last as my appointment ends before June next year. My involvement was really minimal (only text editing) since the staff members knew what to do best for the event given their past experience.

Dato' Kamel Ariffin was named as the Leading Figure (tokoh) of the institute this year since he has led the institute for the last 13 years or so. He also gave the invited lecture for this event where he reminded us on the vision and mission of the institute, which we most often read but not properly paid attention to. The vision of the institute is the following:

It is the vision of the Institute for Mathematical Research to become a renowned institute in mathematical sciences research, contributing towards the development of progress and well-being of mankind.

It is certainly similar to the vision of many other institutes/centres but the challenge is how can we realise it. What are the gaps? For me, we can't do without international recognition and to have recognition as such, we have to be technically on par with established institutes (the prominent ones were mentioned in Dato's talk). Having international networks can be part of the process to get such recognition and I believe, I have mentioned it in one of my presentations a few years back (though later I found out it wasn't very well-received by some). Now, I say "part of the process" because at the heart of what matters are the content/output that we are producing. This is very much dependent of the context of how we are evaluated. For instance, Isaac Newton Institute (INI) is an institute that are based on research activity programmes carried out there (see here) and hence their goals or KPIs are different from ours. We are still subjected to the common set of KPIs that are given to the other faculties/institutes of the university and hence must be addressed as such. This can be difficult given that some KPIs may not really address the strength of mathematical sciences. Nevertheless we will soldier on. Back to international recognition, a key point to address is our research, addressing questions of common interest to the international community or if it is a niche area, commonly accepted at the level of international standards. This should be done every now and then as new topics come into favour and old ones might die out. In the past, privately I also have suggested that we should start the culture of submitting preprints of our papers to international repositories like the arXiv. In this way, our work gets wider international exposure and possibly more citations. This is not part of our practice just as yet.

Talking about international content, another matter raised is multidisciplinary topics and in particular the use of mathematics in biology, perhaps due to the university's tradition in agricultural sciences. I couldn't agree any better with this one and I have been mentioning the need to go beyond our strict disciplines (even within the mathematics subdisciplines themselves). Perhaps even closer to mathematics than biology are physics and computer science. Mathematics and physics historically have been close partners and in the institute, we have areas like nonlinearity and secure communications that could have been developed together with the physicists. Computer science of course even had shared department with mathematics before; while now separated into different faculties, closer co-operation could still be maintained and new areas could be explored (such as the ones that have been proposed earlier with University of Auckland) and in particular data science/mining. During my visit to UMT earlier, I had mentioned the same thing. Even with mathematical biology, many leading experts have (theoretical) physics background. For instance, Reidun Twarock (see the INI video in the given link above) whose group-theoretical work on virus structures is well known, had an earlier background on quantization. Coincidentally, Twarock was a guest of the institute during the mathematical biology conference that I had chaired sometime ago (see her article in this conference proceedings). For agricultural sciences, we had earlier close contact with Biomathematics & Statistics Scotland (BioSS) which could have been put into advantage but now that our researcher, who had this contact, has left the institute, the co-operation has now slowed down. Thus, we had many opportunities to follow the multi-disciplinary route as suggested but again we need willing partners.

Presently, we have an upcoming big opportunity with the Malaysia-Italy Centre of Excellence for Mathematical Sciences, whose office is in the same building as the institute. We could not be any closer to an international entity than this and from what I have heard, the focus research areas are may be industrially driven, requiring multidisciplinary outlook. I look forward to what can be done with the centre and I suggest this to be our main focus in the near future since such opportunity is very rare. With only a few years of service left with the university, this has to be taken up mostly by our younger colleagues. I do wish that my younger colleagues will take up the opportunity with the Italians and also meet the challenges posed here and by Dato'. This will certainly pave the way for the institute to be of international repute. I wish the institute all the best in its future undertakings.

I end this post with the multimedia presentation made earlier for our Innovation Day:

Misplacing Lessons in Ramadhan

It was only yesterday that we got the pleasant news that UPM was listed as one of the top 50 Asian universities by QS University Rankings. But then came another piece of news that shocked us all: allegations of Malaysian researchers' misconduct in publications. Even though the group of researchers are from a different university, I hesitated to post the news here, feeling ashamed, as a Malaysian, that this is happening in Malaysia. In any case, the news is now all over the social media and our mainstream media (see here) and we simply have to face the bitter truth. What are the allegations, you can read it here: https://forbetterscience.wordpress.com/2016/06/10/triplicated-paper-with-multiplicated-cells-and-images/. All the little joy we just had moments before reading the post vanish into thin air.

Me and my colleagues had short and long chats about the above matter and worry about the direction of the academia in Malaysia. Like everyone else, we talked much about the KPI culture and the academic pressure that it entails. It seems easy to blame it on KPIs but are these really to blame? Elsewhere in the world, others are also worried about KPIs, just as we are. If KPIs are to blame, it is probably our misplaced emphasis on them since they are merely tools of management and monitoring. The real culprit is our lack of instilled ethics, professionalism and perhaps immature research experience in some of our researchers. We have to take bitter lessons from this episode.

Misplaced or not, we are still having our KPI and Strategy workshop for the institute tomorrow. Among the KPIs to be discussed is the percentage of our publications in Q1 & Q2 journals. How the journals are ranked with respect to the various quartiles are still based on their impact factor within a subject class. It doesn't really say anything about the quality of our publications published there but merely indicate that one is able to penetrate the competitive barrier for acceptance in these journals. Personally, I have been telling my own students, publish where one's own work find more use or where the community of the subject matter flocks to. The Q1/Q2 categories themselves change over time. Anyway, my RA, Hazazi has managed to list (non-exhaustively) the Q1 & Q2 journals that are probably relevant to the institute (see below).



By being informed of what journals are there, one can scan the materials in there and see their technical level and the depth (plus what is considered interesting by the international community). Wherever possible, one can emulate the sophistication and scientific qualities into our research, then publish wherever it is appropriate.

A Trip To Terengganu

Alhamdulillah, we have reached at another Ramadhan. Trying to improve myself and take advantage as much as I could in this blessed month. This post will however be about the trip last weekend to Terengganu, how it got started, the talk I gave there, discussions and some sight-seeing.

It all began with my face-to-face discussions with Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zabidin Salleh. I knew him since his student days (under the supervision of Prof. Adem Kilicman). He has been a regular participant of my EQuaLS event. Thus, when he mooted the idea of me giving a talk at his School of Informatics and Applied Mathematics in Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, I naturally agreed. At the time, I jokingly mentioned that please invite me during the school holidays, so that I can bring my children along. And so I did. The talk was scheduled on 31 May 2016, when the school holidays had just started. To clear up any doubts about my trip, I would also have gone to give the talk there even if the invitation is not during the school holidays because I have been eyeing on building research relationship with either him or Roslan Hasni (the two whom I know at UMT that work in mathematical areas that are not common in Malaysia) and also to get to know the community there (see here). In any case, I have always tried to maximise the benefit of a trip in whatever way I could and in this case, making my family equally happy. One of my son who is studying at UPM could not however make it for this trip, but we already have planned another trip for him to Terengganu when my other half attends a conference there at the end of July (I will stay back then with my youngest). To further eliminate any criticism, most of my time during this trip was spent on preparing the slides (the day before), the talk and the extended discussion with members of the school (and not sight-seeing) and of course the travel. We had decided to drive there to save us the cost of buying flight tickets and also my family gets to use the car for their own sight-seeing . The long drive was bearable since we took turns driving between myself, my other half and my eldest son.

The talk that I gave was pretty much general but hinges in the areas of my research. I had given myself the title "Aspects of Interaction Between Theoretical Physics and Mathematics: Geometry, Algebraic Structures and Graphs", agreed upon by my host. My idea was to get the mathematicians to be interested in some topics of theoretical physics that we do. The contents of my talk is outlined as follows:

• Introducing Physics-Mathematics Interplay
• Geometry & Classical Mechanics
• Enter Quantum Reality (At Your Own Risk)
• Hyperbolic Excursions
• Network Detour
• Summary & References

It took me quite a while to think on how to start off the talk and finally I thought I should begin with the age-old question of whether mathematics is discovered or invented giving the position of a platonist or a formalist respectively. I have always thought that philosophy has a way of analysing things that delineates extreme positions (labeling each accordingly) and that one should not be trapped in this Boolean dichotomy but rather should entertain the whole spectrum between the two. Thus, I relate physics in its way of describing (modeling) external reality with all its abstractions and generalizations, leading to a platonist standpoint. The formalist standpoint comes from further abstraction and generalization that are far divorce from describing any external world, turning mathematics into a gameplay. Having mentioning this, then I started to describe surprises from the physics-mathematics interplay from physicists creating new ideas in mathematics and mathematicians inventing ideas that later led to a surprising usage in physics.

After the introduction, I began to speak on my own research interests. I had to begin with generalized description of classical mechanics in relation to phase spaces the (co-)tangent bundle of R^n as a start and generalised further to nonlinear phase spaces. At this juncture, I also digressed into symbolic dynamics via cutting sequences in the hope to connect with an interest I have in hyperbolic geometry.

With classical mechanics explained, then the discussion proceeded to quantum mechanics via the similarities of the algebras from classical mechanics. This allows me to dwell a bit on the topic of quantization and in fact I did it too long. This leaves me little time to speak on the next topic of quantum theory, namely Kochen-Specker theorem and quantum contextuality. Here I begin introducing graphs with their two-coloring problem and operator algebras. Had I have more time, I would have also introduced geometric contextuality as explained by Planat and collaborators. Another topic I would have loved to introduce is the use of category theory in formalising quantum mechanics via Coecke's diagrammatic calculus; had to limit myself though to certain mathematical ideas in the talk (as mentioned in the title).

The hyperbolic excursion essentially came from my interest in quantizing a particle system on hyperbolic surfaces. I explained that we had to delve into numerically computing eigenfunctions on the surfaces to see the role of the discrete groups appearing in forming the hyperbolic surfaces. Showed the nice pictures that Chan had produced. I also describe some open problems regarding this work. Classical billiards on hyperbolic surfaces exhibit chaotic motion and hence considering quantum theory on these surfaces may lead to research on quantum chaos. I did not get to mention this and neither did I mention the symbolic dynamics which have nice connections to number theory.

The last topic was finally the use of graphs in complex networks, that seems to be a bit far from what I usually do. I explained then that my interest in this was spurred by the few available works in relating hyperbolic geometry with complex networks. Of course, the other point of attraction is its use in describing diverse systems with large datasets. All theorists have this secret dream of having his work being used even in the normal day-to-day experiences and hence my interest in complex networks. 

Finally I summarised with some observations and remarks. I did not get to mention my other interest in mathematical cosmology. I would have loved to say the group-gemetry interplay in describing space-times and even connect with hyperbolic geometry through ideas of cosmic crystallography but that would have been too much. In any case, I'm phasing out my cosmology research for now.

Besides this talk, I also gave an introduction to INSPEM as a publicity drive for the institute (in fact it was requested). Discussions that follow thereafter is the idea of INSPEM as a national institute. The Deputy Dean of the School, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Abdul Fatah Wahab was formerly a staff in the Maths Dept of UPM and he mentioned that he had helped draft the concept paper of the institute. My reply is that I was not there during the initial formulation of the institute and would have not known what are the goals and strategies toward the setting up of a national institute. So far, I did say that INSPEM has been allowing academics from other universities to be external research associates and are welcomed to use available facilities of the institute. Having said this, I can see now two options (which I did not say in the discussion) to go in the direction of a national institute: (1) apply for the MOHE Centre of Excellence; (2) leverage on MICEMS set-up within INSPEM. Both requires high commitment from its members and a lot of hard work.

After the two talks, the discussion went on beyond lunch time, much to ideas being churned out on possible research and on how we can collaborate. My own view is that we have to take what is natural; we first get to know each other's research first and then if something clicks, then we will be able to collaborate better. Finally, we (Zabidin, Roslan, Abdul Fatah, Gobi and myself) went for a late lunch at a seafood restaurant. They discovered later that I do not take seafood. During my parting with them, the idea of a joint seminar with them in INSPEM was mooted. Hopefully we get to realise this.

Here are some pics:

While I was busy preparing my slides and the day I gave the talk, my family went out to do sight-seeing and souvenir-hunting. I only joined them in the trip to the Crystal Mosque, the Monument Park of Taman Tamaddun Islam nearby and in the evening after the talk, the Batu Buruk beach. Here are more pics.

The Crystal Mosque

... and the boat ride

The Monument Park is a couple of minutes walk from the Crystal Mosque and is part of Islamic Heritage Park. They display down-sized models of mosques, monuments and tombs (with interior decorations replicated) all around the world.

Late evening, after the talk we went to Batu Buruk beach:

In the late evening (before the morning when we left), I got to meet and a student of mine, Cikgu Ramli Abdullah. He was a school teacher who went on to get his Bachelor degree and he had to take my quantum mechanics class (sorry for him and his colleagues). We talked about old times and some fellow students during then.

All in all, it was a fun working holiday trip.