Deep waters

India's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), in the waters around its territories, covers almost two-thirds of the country's land area. Although various maritime nations had drawn up bilateral or multilateral treaties about how they would share the resources along their coast, all of those were scrapped when the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was concluded in 1982. 

It was probably the adoption of UNCLOS which prompted the Government of India to think about having a dedicated organization to figure out how to reap the benefits of the natural resources available within its EEZ. Marine engineering only scratches the surface of the oceans, and hence in 1993 was born the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), based in Chennai, with its facilities at Pallikaranai. The NIOT carries out programmes for observation of the ocean as well as for the deployment of vessels to carry out deep-sea surveys in the EEZ. 

Since its founding, the NIOT has surveyed over 13,500 sqkm of the EEZ. The whole extent of India's EEZ is about 2,300,000 sqkm (If you think that's a lot, consider Japan's: over 4,479,000 sqkm, or New Zealand's, at about 4,300,000 sqkm). With so much of available area left to cover, the NIOT certainly has its work cut out over the next century or so!

26, 94

You may not be able to make out what the numbers mean, but that's nothing to be worried about. Even as great a mathematician as G.H. Hardy, who specialized in number theory, was not a numbers man. In that way, he was unlike Srinivasa Ramanujan, for whom numbers were his "personal friends". There is a story about Hardy visiting a very ill Ramanujan at Putney; getting into the room, Hardy mentioned that he had travelled in taxicab number 1729, which seemed to him a "rather dull number". Ramanujan, however, was instantly animated. "No, no, not at all", he said. "It is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways". 

Since then, such numbers have been known as 'Taxicab Numbers'; you can head out here to see some of them, as well as a picture of.... well, something like taxicab number 1729. The story however is just one more example of how the man was completely un-fathomable, even for those who knew what he was talking about. What could he have achieved if he had lived longer than he actually did? 

Ramanujan passed into immortality this day in 1920. And yet, there are many who still don't know about him, or what he did. We go past all these mentions about the greatest mathematician of modern India with reverence, because it is too taxing to try and figure out what was it that he did. This day is marked with special events by the Ramanujan museum in Chennai. I haven't been there yet, but for today, this bust of Ramanujan at the IIT Madras should remind us of his memory!

  

Not a memorial

It should have been, but it is not. But it is from this spot that a 25-year old Iyengar made preparations to lose his caste, trading it for a chance to do the one thing he loved. Srinivasa Ramanujan moved to this part of Triplicane, Hanumantharayan Koil Street, sometime in May 1913. He had been granted a scholarship by the University of Madras, and leave from the Madras Port Trust. All he had to do was mathematics, and to submit a quarterly report on his progress.

And progress he did. Even though correspondence between him and Prof. Hardy over at Cambridge was strained and infrequent, it was all part of a larger plan that Hardy had set in motion. By the new year, Hardy's 'agent', E.H. Neville, a young Fellow of Trinity College was in Madras for a series of lectures on differential geometry. Whether those letters were a success or not, he managed to overcome Ramanujan's apprehensions about travelling to England. 

And so it was that the morning of March 17, 1914, saw the now kudumi-less Ramanujan waiting to board the S.S. Nevasa, with a second class ticket sent by Binny & Co. To see him off were some of Madras' elite: members of the judiciary, bench and bar, professors, colleagues and officers from the Madras Port Trust and members of the press, including Kasturiranga Iyengar of The Hindu. Neither his mother nor his wife were present, having been bundled off to Kumbakonam a few days earlier. A century later, let alone a memorial, not even a memory remains. Even the plaque that was on the premises earlier has disappeared!

Bladeless fan

“You see, Watson, but you do not observe!”

As the world’s first consulting detective Sherlock had good reason to be observant. I started looking closely at – observing – the brands of bathroom fittings in airports, cinemas and other public spaces only after our firm started working with one of the manufacturers. Even then, the other paraphernalia in the rest rooms were not bestowed with my attention. Again, it needed a personal connect for the brand to catch my eye. 

I had read a profile of this British inventor a few weeks ago; even that article stood out from the others because a cousin had signed on with the firm a couple of months ago and he was not sure if any of his firm’s products were being used in India. A lot of things coming out of the firm seem to be very cutting edge, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what a ‘bladeless fan’ could be like.

Until a few days ago. The loo at Escape. Suddenly noticed that I could dry my hands in this – the bladeless fan. Dyson Technology calls it the Airblade, but now that I have used it, I can’t figure out how it is significantly different from the wall-mounted hand dryers that one usually sees at such places!

Quiet house

The Tamizh name for the locality of Chetpet does not inspire confidence; "சேத்துபட்டு " sounds more like a marshy area that one would not like to venture into. The more generally accepted origin of that name is that this pleasant - and at one time scenic - stretch along the western bank of the Cooum was a favourite of the Chettiar community. As they prospered in their trading, they began to move out of the busy George Town area into the bucolic environs of the riverside. Chetpet, it is believed, evolved from 'Chettiar Pettai'.

One of the most prominent among those Chetties was T. Namberumal Chetty, the 'master builder' of later 19th-century Madras. It is said that he had at one time 99 bungalows across Madras, most of them in Chetpet; he believed that the 100th would bring him bad luck. More superstitious than him was the mathematician Ramanujan. When Ramanujan got to know that he was moving to Chetpet from Triplicane, his first response was to say that it was to make him go away "சட்டுப் புட்டு" ("chattu-puttu", meaning very briskly).

Ramanujan was convinced that the move to Chetpet would be good for him. Namberumal Chetty put one of his bungalows, named Crynant at his disposal. Again, the cynic in Ramanujan came to the fore: "என்ன அழுமூஞ்சியா இருக்கு! Cry-nant, that is a bad omen" said he. Namberumal moved him to another of his houses, Gometra, a short distance from Crynant, which was where Ramanujan breathed his last. Gometra is also no more. Crynant, in the picture, remains pretty much as it was almost a hundred years ago. The gate post continues to show the name T. Namberumal. Most probably the builder's descendants continue to live in this bungalow!

Proud employer

Imagine you are the foremost mathematician of your time, living in Cambridge, England. Imagine you get a letter from Madras, postmarked January 16, 1913, which starts off,

"Dear Sir, 

I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course...."

What would you do?

G.H. Hardy was intrigued by the letter and the 9 pages of theorems appended with it. Some were familiar, many were not. At the end of it, Hardy concludes, "They must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them". Thus began a great collaboration in the world of mathematics, one that has been described several times over (most brilliantly by Robert Kanigel in 'The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan'). 

Ramanujan was encouraged to write that letter by Sir Francis Spring, the Chairman of the Madras Port Trust and S. Narayana Iyer, the Chief Accountant. That they had taken such an interest in the non-official activities of a Class III Grade IV clerk was because that post was a sinecure, procured by the efforts of R. Ramachandra Rao, the district collector of Nellore and secretary of the Indian Mathematical Society. Ramanujan had been introduced to Ramachandra Rao in 1910 and had requested Rao for "leisure" to work on his mathematics. Rao arranged to bear his expenses, at the same time looking out for a more stable arrangement.

That arrangement was worked out in early 1912. Ramanujan joined the Madras Port Trust on March 1 that year. His tenure at the Port Trust was short; but it was the only formal employment he ever had. So it is that this bust is placed in the foyer of the Port Trust's Conference Hall - a proud employer honouring its most famous employee!

Eclipse in a box

Not wanting to be bothered with 'special sunglasses' to view the eclipse today, we just used a shoebox as a pinhole camera to watch the shadow of the moon cross the sun's face. And it did give us a rather good view of the eclipse's progress, though we had to keep moving the shoebox constantly to make sure it caught the sun's rays.

The astronomers of the Madras Presidency, during the 19th century, were considerably better equipped. They had state-of-the-art equipment at their command, for the British knew that accurate astronomical observations would directly help in better navigation - and also for better understanding the geography of the subcontinent which was now under their control. As part of these observations, the astronomers would also study the solar eclipses. It was only the later half of the 1800s that these observations laid the foundation for solar physics, a hitherto unknown branch of science.

More specifically, it was the total eclipse of Augst 18, 1868 which set off the spark for the new science. In a display of scientific cooperation, the team from the Madras Observatory was joined by an addtional team of British astronomers, as well as a team of their French counterparts, to study that eclipse. Observing the event from different locations in and around Madras, the teams found their spectrometers displaying a bright yellow line, which could not be explained away as sodium. It was based on these observations that Pierre Janssen and Norman Lockyer deduced the existence of Helium, leading to both of them being jointly credited as having discovered that element - though it is almost forgotten that it was the Madras Observatory which set it up for them*.

Our observations from the shoebox did give us a lot of fun; no new elements were discovered in the process, however!

* Though Janssen made his readings at Guntur and Lockyer at Vijaydurg, all the arrangements for observing this eclipse - and subsequent ones - were made by the Madras Observatory, which was the leading, if not the only, astronomical observatory in India at that time.

Complex toys

Imagine what that block of wood, plastic or rubber would do. Then go ahead and move that block to get it done. That's what the first toys were like. The form the wooden block would take was limited only by the child's imagination. If an adult did not quite see it that way, it is only to be expected. "Grown-ups don't understand", as The Little Prince said. The grown-ups, though began to seek their revenge and impose their understanding, when they began to make the toys more 'realistic': now a battery powered radio controlled model of a P51 Mustang could only be a battery-powered-radio-controlled-model-of-a-P51-Mustang and nothing else.

Which is why this whole business of LEGO Education's toys seems to be a very good thing. In the first place, it gives a lot of control back to the child. In the second place, it keeps the adults off the child, for now the child says 'you don't understand', and the grown-up has to keep quiet, because it is true for most part! In the case of their Mindstorms line of products it is especially true, because they are LEGO blocks powered with software; with 4 different kinds of sensors, they can be built and programmed to carry out different tasks. There was a show last week, where a set of companies associated with robotics education was trying to show how such (and other similar types of) toys could be used to develop kids' interest in robotics.

That may be, but at the show, most of the interest was centred on these bots , one trying to move on the black line and the other trying to knock of the red ball. Robotics or no robotics, the kids had fun with the toys!

Reaching for the moon

Fairly historic day, today. India's first moon mission lifted off early in the day, from the launch site at Sriharikota, about 100 km north of Chennai. We had had some plans of driving down to watch the launch - but with the weather being what it is, it did not seem like a good idea, especially considering that we would have to watch the launch from somewhere outside the gates of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre. In the early days of the Centre (it was set up in 1971), Madras was the place to go for the scientists working at 'SHAR'; these days, Sullurpet seems to provide enough entertainment for them. In any case, with several missions lined up, entertainment will probably be the last thing on their mind.

Chennai continues to be a major feeder hub for the Sriharikota Range. It will take about 3 hours to get to SHAR by road - of which a third would be spent in getting out of the Chennai traffic. The trains are faster, but they take you only as far as Sullurpet and you've got to get back on to the road after. Sriharikota is actually an island, so there is also the option of taking a boat from Pazhaverkadu (Pulicat) and getting across the Pulicat lake.

Having decided long ago that today's post / picture would be about SHAR, I had not made any alternate plans despite the rains. These clouds may not be of this morning, but they are definitely the clouds over Chennai a few days ago!