Falling

I was the last (together with my youngest son) in the family to get infected with virus since the last few days. I'm getting better now and was left with some bad cough; took pain killers before for my back. So yesterday, I excused myself from Friday prayers so that I don't spread the disease. But instead of resting, we received a phone call from our youngest son that he fell down the stairs in UniKL-MFI (around 12.30 noon) and he could not properly stand. He was sent to An-Nur Hospital by one of the staff (thank you). We waited for the update from the staff and later he called and said that our son had a fracture in the navicular bone. After receiving the call, we rushed off to fetch him at his room. We were already planning to fetch him before that for the weekend but now he will have the whole week stay at home before a follow-up set up at the nearest hospital in Seremban.

On meeting him, we asked him what had happened. He said he was carrying a box of folders (don't know how heavy) down the stairs but somehow he had not placed his foot on the steps and fell forward around five to eight flight of steps downwards. Luckily, the box he was carrying cushioned his fall for otherwise the injury might be worse (thankful that did not happen). I will be dishonest if I say I'm not feeling sore for the whole matter but I accept this as fate. The hospital bill itself costs more than RM500 (for the X-ray, backslab and medication) and later had to fork out around RM400 for a wheelchair, bought after arriving in Seremban (I do need to find a job after all these extra expenses).

I do really pity him after all the injuries he had to go through (see this post and this post). One thing I do admire about him is his patience and cheerfulness despite all these injuries. Here is a photo of him arriving home.

and here is today's photo in his room when we bought him lunch (bought from RM3 stall).

Trip to Putrajaya and Watermelon Still

Have paused my posting much due to we had viral fever in the house (even had one earlier draft post has yet to be uploaded). Initially my sons (eldest and third) and my other half was having flu and fever and I was somehow spared from it. They took medication and are still having residual symptoms. At the time, we were planning to go to Putrajaya to accompany our son for an interview on Monday. Booked ourselves a room at Everly Hotel, the hotel that brought us memories of the late Prof. Twareque Ali. My other half and I still remembered rushing off to the hotel when we heard of his departure. Nothing much has changed since then (I think). On trying to find a place to stay, I also found out that Putrajaya Pullman Hotel had already closed in 2019. Memories there too.

We went to Everly on Sunday afternoon (five of us but only three of us stayed at the hotel). Here are some photos.

While we were there, my third son took us to Tuanku Mizan Zainal Abidin Mosque and thereafter to Alamanda to get some dinner.

My son's interview was on Monday morning and once his interview is over, we went back to Seremban. By this time, I develop some viral fever symptoms, particularly attacking joints and my back. Hence I rested most of this week.

Finally, I am still following the gen0cide in Ghazza despite my 'silence'. Occasionally I shared horrifying news in the social media. In any case, most people are aware of what is going on, even if some wished to ignore it (and of course this includes the colonialists). May Allah grant justice for the oppressed.

Doa Selamat Event of Safe Trip for Hajj

Last Friday, we picked up our youngest son from UniKL-MFI so that he can join us for an event on Sunday. Given that he does not have friends of the same age at his work place, the weekend will be better spent with us.

The event on Sunday was for Majlis Doa Selamat for my sister and her husband to go for Hajj in the coming week. In a way, this is also like a family Eid gathering (even though that Shawwal had ended just a few days earlier). I was happy to be able to see my brothers and sisters as well as their families and relatives. Here are some photos.

I was a bit down (some things do not quite go our way recently) and was a bit unwell as well at the time and did not strike too much conversation. Nevertheless was happy to see everyone. There were some discussions on some projects for which I'm pretty open to the idea. In any case, for my sister and brother-in-law, I wish them a safe trip to and fro to the Holy Land and may Allah ease their way there and grant them a mabrur Hajj.

That One Internationalization Attempt

Recently I publicise a post in my Malay blog and also reactivating my social media posts. Somehow, I can't help feeling 'dirty' doing it, making me guilty of being perceived as an attention seeker. The intentional dynamics can change very quickly from hoping to educate others to something that pushes one's ego. I would like to keep that under control.

The post mentioned above was intended to be a 'review' of the book "Reduction, Emergence & Levels of Reality" for which one of its authors, Lamberto Rondoni had several times been to UPM. The post became more of my attempt to understand the ideas of what the authors wrote on, rather than being a review. As the title of the book suggests, it focuses on the themes of reductionism and emergence (behaving like opposites); reductionism is perhaps familiar to the way physicists think but emergence is somewhat nebulous and the book expounds on where this arises. Any good student of science will benefit on reading this book since it gives an idea of how science is patched up between the different areas. An important lesson here is that it is not enough to work on an idea in science without knowing how it fits into a bigger scheme of the larger body of knowledge. This is why I told my students that it is not enough to do some calculations without understanding their implications in other parts of the science that one wants to build.

I did not know Prof. Rondoni until I was introduced to him during his first visit. Note that his earlier visits are essentially hosted by other members of the institute that I was part of. As usual, I do look up into his research areas just like other visitors to the institute, and to my surprise, he happens to be a theoretical physicist working in the area of statistical mechanics and dynamical systems. He gave several talks at the institute and naturally, I had some conversations with him, perhaps exploring areas where one could collaborate. It was during his later visits, our conversations turned to the possibility of setting up an ICTP-like institute, which had several versions. Finally, we thought of having a centre within the institute, partly to avoid some administrative issues and this was agreed upon from both Malaysian and Italian sides. 

I tried to encourage others to get involved in this collaboration because it takes more than just a few individuals to make it happen. Visits from both sides were made possible under the Erasmus+ programme. Many students had the opportunity to visit Polito then, including two students of mine. One of them had a joint publication with a Polito researcher; see arXiv version here and published version here. I too, had the opportunity to visit Polito during my final days with the institute. 

During the visit, I was desperate to find an area where we (Santo, Syed and me) can work with Prof. Rondoni. It was rather a difficult mix; both Syed and I have interest in geometric ideas while Santo and Prof. Rondoni work on chaos, which tends to be numerical. There is this idea of Nambu brackets which have applications to chaos that we wanted to explore and they can have geometric origins. However, without specific problems being solved and I failed to convince them to pursue this direction. The other problem I suggested is hyperbolic billiards, their symmetries and the quantum versions. There is some interest in this though we did not continue.

I gather that now the centre is no longer being pursued as interests fizzled, which is rather unfortunate. For me, I always consider having a good mix of international researchers and local ones is good for our scientific development. Like the title of Dyson's paper, it is one of the great missed opportunities. We need to learn some lessons from this.

A Month of 'Eid

Since my last post, I have been doing a lot of family matters, mainly 'Eid visits. We were in Kepong before the wedding (the 12th Eid day on Sunday) at the homes of my two sisters-in-law; their husbands are my late eldest and second eldest brothers. No photos unfortunately this time; perhaps this 'Eid is rather more gloomy that the past 'Eids, partly due to personal challenges and also the Ghazzah genocide. We missed the function of my sister-in-law in Saville Residence (married to my third eldest brother) because it was held on the first day of 'Eid and we were occupied with my other half travelling back to Segamat. On Tuesday thereafter, we essentially spent the whole day in Kuala Lumpur for 'Eid visits to the homes of my other half's sister and brother in Taman Keramat and Taman Melawati respectively (no pictures again). Then next, we have the wedding in the Mines mentioned in the last post.

My youngest came back from his MUET exams in UiTM Jasin on Tuesday (a day before Labour day). We were glad he arrived home safely. The next day being public holiday, my in-laws (sisters and brother of my other half) decided to visit us. So my other half decided to prepare some dish while I ordered satay from a local restaurant. There are pictures this time.

Come Saturday, we were in Labu at the invitation of my other half's brother. I did not realise that Labu was just quite close to our place when we took Taman Rimba (or something) route near Ainsdale. Pictures available.

My FB also showed that a year has passed since my other half had her CSF leak surgery (see this post). I am actually worried if the leak recurs particularly she is now experiencing some flu. Yesterday, we went to my brother Nordin's place in Pandan Indah. I regretted that I did not take any photos there since all his sons and daughter were there together with my sister and husband (with their son) who are about to perform Hajj (lucky for them and I pray that everything will go well). During the visit, my nephew asked me if I was still working and I replied in the negative. He was then telling me that in his office, there is a 70-year old person still working. I know that my brother Nordin is still working these days on Islamic GMP training and consultation. I hope I can still work for our livelihood but I have yet to find a suitable opening.

Finally after Pandan Indah visit, we sent our youngest son to his 'new room' in UniKL-MFI. The condition might not be so great but he has now more privacy (the previous room he got, has to be shared with five other students). He was placed in the Lyons block. Hope he will be able to work well with now having more rest (without the need to commute from Seremban). He will be here until August, God willing.

New Driver, 'Eid Visits and a Wedding

After 'Eid, my youngest son is still commuting from Seremban to his industrial training place in UniKL-MFI, much due to the room requested has yet to be confirmed. Since we have gone past Ramadhan (with sahur and iftar may become problematic for our son), we thought that he should try to start driving himself to UniKL. Quite a few times, we asked him to drive on one part of the journey while we were still sending him and picking him up. Going to UniKL is more challenging since this is very early in the morning and the traffic volume is high. 

After the few times of practice, we finally let him drive by himself to UniKL and back. Good for the UniKL-MFI, that he was allowed to park the car within the campus.

He has also started to drive to UiTM campus in Jasin for the MUET workshop and he has a friend (Muhammad Zidizaidan) that tagged along for the trip.

The last weekend, he finally sat for his MUET exams together with his friend and he just came back today. Alhamdulillah, I'm happy that he is now able to drive the car even for a long distance.

Interspersed during the last week or so, we made a few 'Eid visits to Kepong and KL. Due to these family commitments (and my bad back), I had to back out from a research paper project since I can't do my part in time as required from the collaborators. Particularly the last weekend, we had a wedding to attend and help out and thus, I just could not really excused myself from it to do my work. Anyway here are some pics from the wedding.

I actually missed out the large group photo as I was resting elsewhere (having back pain) at the time.

Leaving A Mark: My Mathematics Genealogy

A few months ago, I updated my Mathematics Genealogy page. It was finally updated about two weeks ago and I publicised the page on my FB wall. Some might ask why have I not updated this earlier. Mainly procrastination but before this, I was still wondering whether I will be taking any more students; I was contemplating to get another job even after retirement to help me pay bills. This seems very unlikely now.

Note that the list only contains PhD students who are directly under my main supervision. For completeness, I list down MSc students who are under my main supervision:

• Toh Sing Poh, "Cosmic Crystallography: CCP-Index of Thurston Manifold" (2002)
• Abubaker Ahmed Mohammed Siddig, "Mathematica Packages for Solving Schrodinger Equation with One-Dimensional Rectangular Potentials" (2003)
• Aslam Abdullah, "Extending Bianchi's Classification of Homogeneous Three-Manifolds" (2006)
• Ch'ng Han Siong, "Accelerating Cosmologies with Extended Product Spaces" (2006)
• Nurisya Mohd Shah, "Energy Eigenequation Expansion for a Particle in Singly Punctured Two-Torus and Triply Punctured Two-Sphere Systems" (2008)
• Mazlinda Zainy, "The Discrete Phase Space for 3-Qubit and 2-Qutrit Systems Based on Galois Field" (2009)
• Siti Nurul Ain Hj Zaiton, "Qutrits and Lie Algebraic Structure on Tensor Product of SU(3)" (2010)
• Mojtaba Aliakbarzadeh,  "Generating Mutually Unbiased Bases and Discrete Wigner Function for Three-Qubit System" (2011)
• Lam Shi Xiang, "A Network Structural Analysis of Malaysian Stock Market with Edge Density Constraint" (2013)
• Wong Wen Wei, "Geometry of Two-Qubit System and Hopf Fibration" (2013)
• Ahmad Hazazi Ahamad Sumadi, "Canonical Group Quantisation on One-Dimensional Complex Projective Space" (2015)
• Syed Nasrullah Ali Qazi, "Two Fluid Scenario for Dark Energy Models in a Bianchi Type I Universe" (2015)
• Choong Pak Shen, "Characterizing Two- and Three-Qubit Entanglement by Their Tensors" (2016)
• Nor Syazana Shamsuddin, "Maass Cusp Form on Asymmetric Hyperbolic Torus" (2017)
• Zurita Ismail, "Structure of Co-Authorship Network in UPM Journal Publication Database From 2007-2010" (2019)
• Siti Aqilah Muhammad Rasat, "The Role of Compositionality in Constructing Complementary Classical Structures Within Qubit Systems" (2021)
• Ahmad Aqwa Rosli, "Pictures of Processes With Abelian Rotation Symmetry" (2023)

Additional note: It is funny that I missed one of the MSc students in my latest CV. Also, the last MSc student graduated after my official retirement (end of 2022).

In total, I have 10 PhD students and 17 MSc students under my direct supervision. I have not included those students under my co-supervision, despite that there is room for adding second or third advisors in the Mathematical Genealogy page. This is mainly because supervisory committee is simply the necessary requirement of the Graduate School. The intended purpose of a supervisory committee is actually good in ideal contexts, but practically, its role may break down when expertise of members of the committee have very little in overlap. This is particularly true for theoretical physics where we have difficulty in finding supervisory committee members and thus most of the other members have little knowledge of theoretical ideas (likewise, I have very little knowledge on experimental techniques). Of course, there are cases where such supervisory committee actually work. Note that in my case, there are a few of my co-supervised students for which I did actively advising them. Even in my retirement, I still give advices to 'students'; the latest was a staff who is supposed to join UPM Physics Department soon (was surprised by his visit to my home before Ramadhan). Thus, it is best that I exclude the co-supervised students altogether (some do not even fit in mathematics research).

Some may ask about the number of students under my supervision, why that many. Indeed, I felt the same way, but if I compare myself with my colleagues in other fields, the number is pretty averageBut for a theorist, the number seems to be above average. At an early stage, I thought I should avoid taking PhD students given my little experience. I thought to myself, it is better for students to have the PhD research experience abroad where the community is larger. Thus, I begin to take quite a substantial number of MSc students particularly in areas that I would like to experiment on. Note however, my first graduate student was actually a PhD student from Algeria (whose MSc was in nuclear physics), but it was related to the work I do in PhD. More PhD students follow thereafter, (including those who did their MSc with me, even though I forewarned them that staying put with a single supervisor tend to give limited research experience and that they might like to venture elsewhere). I also ventured PhD research in cosmology and quantum field theory, which are not my main research areas. In these cases, I often insist having external supervisors from abroad who have more experience in the area than me.  

If one looks at my supervisor (RS Ward) mathematics genealogy page, it seems that I have contributed quite a significant fraction to his (30) descendants.

I have my own reasoning for having the number of students that I have, but I will do a different post for this reason.

Now, if one looks at the picture above, the supervisor of my supervisor is Roger Penrose. I have already felt blessed to note this lineage that includes greats like Penrose even before he won the Nobel Prize. In fact, I was indeed already feeling blessed to have Richard Ward of the Atiyah-Ward transform fame. When I had him as my supervisor, I did not even know that Roger Penrose was his supervisor until very much later on, but I do know that his research involved twistors as a mathematical tool. Having these two intellectuals as part of my academic lineage is already something great to have, but I was told (by Tawfik; I did not check beforehand) later on that this lineage goes even back to Isaac Newton and Galileo! Here I write down my academic ancestors:

• Richard Ward
• Roger Penrose
• John Arthur Todd
• Henry Frederick Baker
• Arthur Cayley
• William Hopkins
• Adam Sedgwick
• Thomas Postlewaite
• Stephen Wisson
• Walter Taylor
• Robert Smith
• Roger Cotes
• Isaac Newton
• Isaac Barrow
• Vincenzo Viviani
• Galileo Galilei
• Ostilio Ricci
• Niccolo Fontana Tartaglia

What is the point of highlighting all these? For me, it is just a matter of recognising the blessings one has. I hope my own students feel the same way too. It is not something to really take pride in since having a great lineage does not necessarily entail one is great. Only doing/establishing a good academic work will determine one's stature and it is not for ourselves to judge or say whether we are doing great (or not). The words of Prof. Lamberto Rondini are always on my mind: (paraphrasing) it is not easy to leave one's mark even in one's own narrow field, let alone for the bigger field of science. My own words to my junior colleague quite recently (without the intent of being derogatory): all of us are trying leave a mark in science internationally (or locally), always on the look out for fresh ideas that are of importance to the (relevant) community. If we are lucky, we will stumble onto one or two works with lasting impact but otherwise we are in the fold of many (average) scientists trying to do something worthwhile or useful.

As a side note, I do dream to have scientific work that have lasting impact in quantum sciences, mathematical sciences particularly those with geometrical and topological ideas. Most of the time, international scientists tend to be more appreciative of such effort in comparison to local ones. Time will tell if any of the things that we do, has some form of impact.

Tea Pot Incident

Warning: This post should be read with an open mind. Otherwise, one can dismiss it as it is written with an enigmatic mood.

Last Monday, a glass teapot from which we often had tea from, 'exploded' while it was left to dry near the kitchen cabinet. The teapot can be seen below with my youngest son.

At the time, the teapot has been left to dry (for sometime) in the place shown below. This shelf is embedded in the kitchen cabinet, elevated just slightly above the head level.

At the time, my other half was there nearby. As she turned her back to this drying shelf, the glass teapot 'exploded' into tiny pieces. If she had not turned, tiny glass pieces would have been blown into her face. Thank God, she did not get hurt by the 'explosion'. Tiny pieces of glass did go into our food, which was on the stove (not lit up and it was more than a metre away). We had to throw away all the food thereafter.

Why the 'explosion'? If I were to put my scientist cap on, the most likely explanation would be thermal stresses in the glass that may be just waiting its time to release the stress. Note that the teapot had no hot water in it and it was washed and left on the shelf for sometime. So in a way, there was no immediate cause that could have explained the matter.

Nevertheless, it was rather mysterious that it happened so. Alongside with other 'mysterious' events happening in our (personal) lives, I felt rather disturbed about them. Whenever such things happened (and also when I don't feel right about myself), I started to recite the long Surah Al-Baqarah as it is recommended for us to do so. The recitation itself normally takes more than two hours altogether and I often break the recitation into several parts. It can be exhausting (perhaps not being used to it).

I will not be apologetic about the matter. Indeed for muslim, we do accept the 'unseen world', which includes the realm of the beings of djinn. The only problem is that there will be a grey area between being overly superstitious and understanding it in the Qur'anic way. In the Qur'an, there is a chapter called Surah Jinn (Surah 72) and scattered in other places, the word djinn is mentioned 201 times (one can also consult https://www.qurananalysis.com/). So when it comes to the unseen world, we can only rely on what the scriptures and prophetic traditions have revealed. May Allah protect us from all forms of fitnah.