Wednesday, November 30, 2005

flight capital: anybody read this book?

nov 30

interesting book, laying out the fact that lots of clever people from eight countries: india, ireland, iceland, singapore, china, taiwan, israel and mexico are leaving for their home countries.

iceland? that surprised me too.

this is a serious long-term problem for the us.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0891062025/102-7009855-3456958?v=glance&n=283155

ps. oops, hit "send" too soon before

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

what am i missing here?

Anonymous said...

Some interesting stuff about Fibonacci numbers on the Indian classical music Google Group. It was posted by a person named Jai Maharaj, whose name I've come across in many different India-related groups. Don't know who he is. Maybe I should Google and find out...

Has anyone read "The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization"? It talks about a similar subject that the note below refers to, i.e., how a lot of "original" Western ideas were actually borrowed from the East. It's quite interesting.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FIBONACCI NUMBERS, THE VED AND BHARATIYA CLASSICAL MUSIC

Forwarded message from Ganesh

[ Subject: fibonacci numbers, the vedas and indian classical music
[ From: Ganesh
[ Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005

here's an interesting 'national public radio' (npr) piece
that just caught my attention.. 28 yr old manjul bhargava
who has won a coveted full professorship in maths (in oct
'04) at the prestigious princeton university has talked
to npr..

in this npr interview, he talks about the connection
between sanskrit vedic poetry (vedas/chandas), classical
indian music, the number theory, the 'da vinci code', and
the all pervasiveness in nature of what he calls the
hemachandra/gospala numbers (after the great vedic
mathematicians, probably well known to most of us as the
FIBONACCI series - a name the series has been given
almost 800 years after they have been proposed by the
indians, see p.s. for more details on this)

he fascinatingly notes how that mathematical pattern
originally unravelled by the great indian vedic
mathematicians is all embedded in indian vedic hymns and
classical musical rhythms.. and even, like most of you
might already know, in something as mundane as the petals
in a flower.. for example, the number of petals in a
daisy or a sunflower is a hemachandra/gospala number..

here's the npr link (don't miss the audio interview - 6
mins.)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4111253

cheers 'n regards,

/g.

p.s: Fibonacci says in his book *Liber Abaci* (the first
edition was dated 1202) that he had studied the "nine
Indian figures" and their arithmetic as used in various
countries around the Mediterranean and wrote about them
to make their use more commonly understood in his native
Italy. So he probably merely included the "rabbit
problem" from one of his contacts and did not invent
either the problem or the series of numbers which now
bear his name. D E Knuth adds the following in his
monumental work *The Art of Computer Programming: Volume
1: Fundamental Algorithms* errata to second edition

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

Before Fibonacci wrote his work, the sequence *Fn* had
already been discussed by Indian scholars, who had long
been interested in rhythmic patterns that are formed from
one-beat and two-beat notes. The number of such rhythms
having *n* beats altogether is *Fn+1*; therefore both
Gospala (before 1135) and Hemachandra (c. 1150) mentioned
the numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ... explicitly.

More details at a number of places including

http://www.mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibBio.html

Anonymous said...

Oh, so lifting from Indian civilisation is an old Italian game. And all those days I was thinking it was a newfound idea.

Anonymous said...

san, hallelujah! the future has certainly arrived!

Anonymous said...

Nizhal Yoddha,

Read the reviews...interesting!

Reminds me of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsar's parable---where the 'erudite scholar' meets the boatman!

Anonymous said...

Take away racial prejudices and christianizing imperial tendencies....America holds a lot of promise then!!

You cannot deny the 'normal' white man is quite creative and committed.
Also possesses the ability to laugh at himself!