Friends, Present and Past

(Updated: 2 August 2018, 10.30am)

Everyone needs a friend to help ease life better, to share our ups and downs, even if the friend is simply our family member. Most of my current friends are those whom I meet almost every day, among students, colleagues and staff; not that sociable beyond this circle. While not sociable, I try my best not to make enemies though sometimes difference of opinions can get intense. These days, particularly in social media, people sometimes use difference of opinions, unfortunately to create 'enemies'. My own take on difference of opinions is to use what we know about solutions in maths as a guide. Many times, we can't find solutions simply because the (mathematical) system is overconstrained, allowing too many variables into it. If we understand mathematical modeling, we can sometimes ignore some variables (making it less constrained) or allow variables to be parameters, for us to find tractable solutions. Sometimes we even find multiple or even infinite solutions and to this, any solutions will do. Thus, in the complex sphere of human life, I do take difference of opinions as facets of multiple solutions (whether which is the best depends on criteria (or parameters) adopted) and am happy to leave it at that.

But this is not what I've planned to say in this post. Being completely immersed in my work and in my present circumstances, I tend to lose contact with friends from the past. However, I had some pleasant surprise in the past months, when some of my past friends contacted me through the social media or whatsapp. One of them was Moha Lhousni, a Moroccan friend I met in Durham University who contacted me late last year. He was a school advisor in Morocco but has now retired. I'm happy that he contacted me; I still remember our deep discussions on civilization and I still keep his thesis on  the topic of Discourse Analysis of the Holy Qur'an (seemed to have misplaced the thesis). Here is a picture of me and Moha in London.

Another long lost close friend in Durham, was a fellow theoretical physicist from Palestine. Dr. Maher Rashid. I was happy for being able to talk to him over the phone last Saturday using Messenger. He is currently the Associate Principal of Cedars Academy in Leicester. The contact was actually made possible by Dr. Qasem Nawafleh (also friend in Durham) from Jordan. Here is a recent picture of Maher and Qasem:

On the subject of Durham University friends, I have been added to WhatsApp group "Alumni Durham" where I get to know some people I've met while I was there and of course those whom I have heard their names. I guess in part, the group was created after our present Minister of Education, Dr. Maszlee Malik, an alumni of Durham University. got appointed. He was in Durham more than ten years after I left. I'm not sure whether he actually read the chats that we have there but I look forward to see any good changes in our education system under him.

Other friends that I get to reconnect is Hoe Chee Liang, who was a student when I joined UPM. He has settled down in the US and formed a company known as Cita Education. Since we both are very passionate about theoretical physics, mathematics and education, we talked about possible long term collaboration with his company. With his company, we hope to promote theoretical physics here in Malaysia (perhaps more later).

Another reconnection was with friends from my former school SMSPP. Was already in touch with some of them through Facebook but now I'm added to their WhatsApp. Part of the reason in recontacting me is a future get together, to which the idea of me playing drums back with old school friends was mooted. Unfortunately, my schedule was not favourable to the idea. Would have loved to meet them and also perform. Here is a picture of me playing the drums while I was in Adelaide:

On 18 July, INSPEM had organized Hari Inovasi 2018 to honour the high-achievers of the institute (both academic and non-academic). We also invited those who had served with INSPEM before and this time round we had Dr. Mahendran Shitan who was one of our heads of laboratory. Knew Dr. Mahendran even before I joined the Institute and in fact way back to the days in Bintulu. While he was with INSPEM, we often discuss with each other on arising problems of the institute and possible resolutions. I guess I really missed those moments. He is now retired and looked much happier. Here are some photos of us with him:

Finally yesterday, due to a workshop that we had attended in Ministry of Education in Putrajaya, our group from the institute met my former science officer Nor Yusniza there. I did not realise she was working there before that. Here are some pics of us at cafe Gloria Jean near the entrance:

Conference Going

Conferences, workshops and seminars have been part of academic's life. The traditional role of these activities is to allow the academic to convey and discuss his scientific findings to the public and in particular the scientific community. Good conferences tend to initiate more scientific discussions and even better new collaborations. There is an unfortunate trend these days to have conferences marketing themselves to promise submitted (selected) articles to be considered for publications in some journals. This does have the effect of attracting participants who wish to boost up publications in their CV. However this may take place in higher priority over having interactions with other researchers. Hence, we can see in some conferences that participants disappear as soon as they have presented their talks. Worse is the trend to treat conferences and workshops as commercial activities with profit making as a goal. As such, these activities tend to usually degrade the original goals of conferences and workshops.

Luckily, we still do have good conferences around and they tend to be organized by established institutes and professional organisations. For me, I have been following conferences organized by Institute of Advanced Study, Nanyang Technological University down south in Singapore. The institute has been promoting the work in fundamental sciences and their conferences tend to invite luminaries including Nobel Laureates and Fields Medalists. My colleagues, students and I were fortunate to be at two of them earlier this year. The first is a Memorial Conference for Robert Brout, January 16-19, 2018, whose speakers include Nobel Laureate Francois Englert co-discoverer of spontaneous symmetry breaking with the late Robert Brout and Peter Higgs. Other Nobel Laureates who came are David Gross, Duncan Haldane and Gerard 't Hooft plus a Fields medalist,Michael Atiyah. Below are some memorable photos.

During the first day dinner:

During the banquet dinner. I was happy to meet my Part III lecturer, Malcolm Perry (together with Edward Teo)

Finally our group photo:

The other IAS, NTU conference that I went was the Conference on Particles and Cosmology on 5-9 March 2018. This conference coincides the Meeting of ASEAN Federation of Physical Societies forwhich I attended on behalf of Prof. Kuru. Below is the group photo after the meeting:

Most of the conferences I went to in IAS, NTU had the generous partial support of IAS, to which we are grateful (colleagues, students and I). It is amazing that they are able to run such serious high-level conference and yet support many participants. I sincerely wish that we could do just even a fraction of what they do, noting that they had access to more funds than we do.

Earlier when we had Michel Planat visiting us in INSPEM (see pics below), we were discussing the possibility of going together to Group 32, a well-known series of conference on Group-Theoretic Methods in Physics. Have been once to the one held in Chern Institute, Tianjin in 2012. That conference was very generous to its participants - had my local expenses paid for, thanks to the recommendation of late Prof.Twareque. It is the kind of serious conference that I would love to be associated with. Unfortunately I could not get the local support needed for Group 32 and thus was hoping then that I could get a research grant in time instead. I was also invited by Michel to visit FEMTO as he is about to retire. As time went on, it was clear that I could not get the grant (if successful) in time and decided not to go (if I did, I will use up all my savings).

Unable to go to Group 32, there was another conference that the Director asked me to go instead of her. It is the International Conference on Applied Analysis and Mathematical Modeling (ICAAMM 2018) held in Istanbul on 20-24 June 2018. This conference series began as a cooperation between Malaysian and Turkish mathematical scientists in which our institute was heavily involved. Not having gone to the conference series before, there was hesitation in the beginning, partly due to the conference is almost immediately after 'Eid. Given that I have never been to Turkey and that the organizing committee is supporting the local expenses (travel was supported by the institute), I finally said yes to the invitation and I'm glad that I did. My presentation there spurred some discussions, met nice mathematicians there and got to see historic places. Here are some pics:

It would have been nice to bring my family there. In fact, they wanted to go given that the conference coincides with school holidays. Alas, I don't have that much savings to do so and even I had to forego my third son's back treatment (together with my own), sadly (will need to rely on self-exercises). Anyway, I hope I will have another opportunity with perhaps better financial situation. Anyway, this Istanbul trip is very much a working trip; we managed to squeeze in time to visit our MoU partner, Yildicz Technical University (see pic below).

Early next month, I will go to yet another conference, one that is co-organized by the institute. This is the International Quantitative Research and Applications Conference (IQRAC2018). It is a new conference initiated by Malaysian Academy of Mathematical Scientists (AISMM). As a new conference, it is going to be challenging to put up a community of followers and to make it as a conference that matters particularly for the regional community. I hope to follow this conference closely and wished it to be successful. One worries these days that one's conference is not taken seriously by others given the proliferation of conferences. In fact recently, there is an article raising the issue of "the proliferation of questionable conferences". This brings back to the point I made in the first paragraph of this post: let us make our conferences meaningful by taking scientific interactions as the main goal.