Piece of Mind

It is only 4:00 am (Pacific time) on this chilly Sunday morning, yet I am surrounded by many of British Columbia’s academic elite. Actually, we are flying back home from Ottawa, all eager to get back early enough to catch a few weekend hours with our families. VPs, colleagues, and friends were all attending the 2011 induction ceremony of the Royal Society of Canada. At least it was a party and not the usual Ottawa committee meetings that West coasters learned to love and hate. But my own marathon had started a week earlier. Continue reading →

Using “Google scholar” has always been a most frustrating experience. My publications/citations got always mixed with those of a cardiologist cousin of mine in Paris, and those of a childhood friend who founded a publishing house in London. But who am I to complain? You don’t need more than one hand to count the number of publishing “Ghoussoubs”  in this world. Think about Joe Smith or X.X. Chen. Fortunately, Google and Microsoft have teamed up to come to the rescue. Continue reading →

The early days of Gary Goodyear as Minister of State for Science and Technology were on the rocky side. A well publicized stormy meeting with a CAUT delegation, and a reported attempt to intervene in a peer-review process may have been lapses in judgment, but nothing beyond what you’d expect from a novice minister of state. Fast forward 4 short years and Gary Goodyear has become all but her Majesty’s “Godfather of Science and Technology” in Canada, with all the good stuff that often comes with the presence of such a figure. Continue reading →

Last Friday, I gave a talk at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, California. That the talk was at 11:00 am on 11/11/11 was a pure coincidence. That it started 11 minutes late was not. But “numerology” is not the subject of this post, since I am one of the 100% of mathematicians who cannot “logically” believe in that nonsense.

Today’s post is about the fascinating place that the University of California at Berkeley is. Continue reading →

No, I am not talking about the ordinary tale of the love, passion and mathematics triangle. Nor am I talking about the film, “The Rites of Love and Math” where, having realized that they are seeing each other for the last time, the Mathematician and Mariko make love more passionately than ever, before he tattoos his mathematical equation on her body.  “Their love will live in this formula engraved on her beautiful body…” I am talking about experiences most mathematicians go through much more often than you think, yet they talk about them much less often than they should. Continue reading →

“What were you doing in Montréal?” I asked. “I gave a plenary lecture at the Congress of the Mathematical Association of Quebec on ‘L’erreur en Mathématiques’ … and I cited you a lot :)”. My friend was only half-joking! What he was talking about is how historic mistakes by illustrious mathematicians (such as Henri Lebesgue and Henri Poincaré) have been particularly crucial for the development of mathematics. Then I remembered Shechtman’s remarkable story en route to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, my students’ anguish on their way to their doctoral thesis, my daughter’s super clean and polished university notes from her math and physics courses, Polanyi’s superb article on “Why our scientific discoveries need to surprise us”, and of course the bureaucrats’ soviet-style ways of imposing rigid milestones and requiring precise outcomes on developing research. All this led me to the following brilliant illustration coming from a most unlikely source. Continue reading →

… at least not by faculty, and assuming that the main trigger for the “Occupy.X” movement is the following –quite eloquent– table. Indeed, I learned recently that Canadian university presidents are not always the highest paid within their institutions, and their VPs are often lower than many faculty on the salary scale, courtesy of the medical and business schools. Market (or is it marketing?) oblige. Continue reading →