Eeny, meeny, miny, moe ...

The world is HIS playground, and we are mere players - The Bhagavad Gita

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe is a children's counting rhyme, used to select "it" for games and similar purposes, whose desi counterpart is "inky pinky ponky...". My view on this is, that GOD gave humans the economic concept of utility theory so that they can make a decision on the choices based on their utility value. When presented with choices of identical utility value, humans use counting rhymes as above or toss a coin or any other means to break deadlocks. Another way to look at this type of decision-making is that GOD is unbiased, by default, when choices have identical utility value, and biased towards choice(s) (with higher utility values) when values are distinct. For all those atheists out there, substitute "GOD" by "Nature" as it is commonly modeled in neo-classical and evolutionary game theory.With all pun intended, ofcourse...

I first came across "Eeny, meeny,..." version in 90s in Pulp Fiction and later in Natural Born Killers. It is the latter movie that is more relevant for this post. A wonderful movie about a couple of psychopathic serial killers, Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, followed closely by a journalist Robert Downey Jr., highlighting how paparazzi follows useless people relentlessly, and ends up making them celebrities. Ofcourse all of you could come up with numerous instances in real-life. It seems that when there are so many good news that media could focus on, they always seem to rely on not-so good happenings around the world. While it is important to report about Kosovo, Darfur, Iraq, Paris Hilton, Shilpa Shetty (I'm really not sure about Paris and Shilpa) etc., many good news seem to get marginalized.

Contributions of two Indian mathematicians were acknowledged over the last 1 year or so, by very famous international committees, and the Indian media have ignored them (I would love to be proven wrong), forget the international media. The concerned mathematicians are Prof. Ramdorai Sujatha and Prof. Srinivasa Varadhan. Prof. Sujatha of TIFR was awarded The Ramanujan Prize in 2006 for her work on the arithmetic of algebraic varieties and her substantial contributions to non-commutative Iwasawa theory. Follow http://users.ictp.it/~sci_info/awards/Ramanujan/RamanujanWinners/Ramanujan06.html and http://www.norwayemb.org.in/Press+Releases/ramanujan+prize.htm, for more details. An award in the name of one of the finest Indian mathematicians of all time, founded in Italy, went practically unnoticed. :-(

Prof. Varadhan of CIMS, NYU was awarded the 2007 Abel Prize, regarded as the Nobel equivalent in Mathematics, for his contributions to Probability Theory and for his work in the Theory of Large Deviations. Abel committee's citation in Tamil certainly makes a wonderful read with rarely heard tamil words for quantum statistics, probability theory and various technical terms for concepts in probability. His biography, known to many students, is very poignant. It outline his struggle starting from humble roots in Chennai, his work with his advisor C.R. Rao ( of the famous Cramer-Rao bounds in Statistics) at ISI, Calcutta, his chancy meeting with Russian probabilist A.N. Kolmogorov, his early days at NYU, words of appreciation from another great probabilist Prof. Daniel Stroock of MIT, and lastly tragic death of his son in 9/11 bombings. For more details, look http://www.abelprisen.no/en/prisvinnere/2007/

It is very sad that Indian media failed to honor 2 of its great mathematicians. Such news has the potential to inspire few young kids to achieve something for India. Hope media, in future, will address GOD's/Nature's bias against good news' by dedicating some space and time towards such news.

While on a recent visit to Chennai, one of my uncles casually remarked that Varadhan's family lived a few blocks from where we once lived in East Tambaram. While I was overjoyed on hearing this, I was upset to find that my cousins had no idea of either Prof. Sujatha or Prof. Varadhan and were seemingly happy in discussing about Ash-Abhishek marriage, Shilpa Shetty and likes. This was the motivation for this post.