Ralph Abraham: India, February 8 -- 23, 2014

A week in Kolkata

The occasion for this visit was an invitation from Professor Susmita Sarkar, Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics of University of Calcutta. This university is among the best of India, and this department prides itself on being the first devoted exclusively to applied matematics. The department was now to celebrate its centenary, along with the 150th birthday of its founder, Sir Asutosh Mookerjee, with an International Conferenc on Emerging Trends in Applied Mathematics, and I had been invited to give the keynote talk. My plan centered on global analysis as an emerging trend in applied math, actually emerging since the 1960s.

On most of my visits to Kolkata I have put up at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture (RMIC) Guest House, which is reasonable, spacious, with excellent food (three meals) and tea in the room twice per day. In addition, it is a spiritual and educational center. This time however, I wanted to treat myself to a fancy hotel, the Kenilworth, in the middle of downtown. In the end, I found I was happier with the RMIC, but I did learn my way around the centr of the city.

My goals in Kolkata were two-fold: first, my invited keynote lecture at the special conference, and second, renewing contacts with a few academic colleagues and friends.

For the keynote lecture I had prepared an extensive survey of my recent work (with Mike Nivala of UCLA) on massively complex (and chaotic) dynamical systems, emphasizing our progress since my report at a similar event in Siena last July. That event was celebrating the 100th birthday of Richard M. Goodwin, the unique champion of chaos theory in the field of mathematical economics. But I had seriously misjudged my audience this time in Kolkata, and probably was understood by only the few chaos theorists present.

My second goal was more successful, and I had several wonderful tea chats (called adda in Bengali) through the week. Early on Sunday morning I departed for Calicut (Kozhikode), in Kerala, and my host, the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, or IIMK.