Fulbright Trip #1 of 2004 to Japan, Report

My area, for the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program, is Information Technology/Computational Mathematics.

My tacit understanding was that the purpose of this trip of three weeks was to evaluate and consult on the complex systems programs (content and pedagogy) currently in place in the two universities I visited, the Future University, Hakodate (one week) and Kyoto University (two weeks).

Japan has a long and important tradition in my field of chaos theory and complex dynamical systems, and I had visited Kyoto several times before, over a span of 20 years.

Four years had passed since my last visit. I was surprised to find that, in these years, the global economic downturn had taken a toll on university budgets, and this long tradition of nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory was in decline.

My five lectures and numerous discussions throughout my three-week Fulbright visit were dominated by this problem, and how to address it.