06/07/2025
By 2100, there are many more of us and on average we will live longer. It will be a crowded planet....
Freedom! To Think
By 2100, there are many more of us and on average we will live longer. It will be a crowded planet.
03/04/2025
Doing science is a privilege, one that should not be denied to anybody, least of all because of the imagined limitations of mind or body.
The Cognition of Necessity
Doing science is a privilege and this privilege needs to be shared by all those who wish to be scientists. More to the point, this is a privilege that should not be denied to anybody, least of all …
25/05/2024
At a time when pronunciation or mispronunciation is being drawn attention to as a proxy for various identities and respect, it is good to recall the Buddha's wise advice: Focus on the objective and behave accordingly.
Never Deviate from Sense
Dharmanand Kosambi spent six years of his young adulthood in the wilderness, but that was of his own choosing. Leaving his wife and newborn daughter in November 1899 when he was 23, he wandered off…
13/05/2024
The second edition of Lilavati's Daughters: The women scientists of India is out now. This post discusses the genesis of thebook and gives some of the background to the "Lilavati Project" of the Indian Academy of Sciences In the past 15+ years, much has happened. And there has also not been enough real change.
https://ramramaswamy.wordpress.com/2024/05/13/lilavatis-offspring/
13/05/2024
The second edition of Lilavati's Daughters is now out!
Lilavati’s Offspring
The Indian Academy of Sciences’ Women in Science panel aimed to inspire young women in science by sharing stories of women scientists in India. This resulted in the publication of “Lila…
17/02/2024
On the Bahujan Vihar in Parel, Mumbai.
A Bahujan Vihāra
A concrete form of Dharmanand’s effort to spread the knowledge of Buddhism was along-cherished task of building a Buddhist vihara in the mill area of Parel in Mumbai. It was named ‘Bahujan Vi…
27/01/2024
A rambling review of Giorgio Parisis's book, In a Flight of Starlings: The Wonders of Complex Systems (2023).
Complexity: Simply Wonderful!
Chaos theory, a popular field since the 1960s and ’70s, explores the limits of predictability. Its influence extends to climate change discussions. Giorgio Parisi, a notable physicist and Nob…
10/01/2024
"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library" Jorge Luis Borges
Borges’ Paradise
In the year 1 B.P. (1 Before Pandemic, or 2019 in other words) I was in Buenos Aires and a visit to El Ateneo, a spectacular bookstore there reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges’ quote, “I…
15/12/2023
DD Kosambi contributed significantly to numismatic metrology, focusing on how the average weight of a coin decreases and the varied weights of the same denomination of coins increase with usage. In his time at Harvard, he donated 26 Indian silver coins to the Fogg Museum. However, the origins and nature of these coins remain ambiguous, and they have been missing since the 1970s. Kosambi's numismatic studies emphasized the importance of analyzing coin hoards from every period for historical reconstruction....
26 Pieces of Silver
DD Kosambi contributed significantly to numismatic metrology, focusing on how the average weight of a coin decreases and the varied weights of the same denomination of coins increase with usage. In…
15/11/2023
D D Kosambi was born in his maternal grandfather's home in Chikhali, Goa on 31 July, 1907.
The Kosambi Nativity
D D Kosambi died in his sleep on 29 June 1966, a few weeks short of his 59th birthday. The date of his birth is recorded as 31 July 1907 but the place of his birth is not as clearly specified.
21/10/2023
D D Kosambi's Letture in Nature (1932)
The one that got away
I thought I had made a complete bibliography of D D Kosambi’s published papers in mathematics, statistics, as well as in other areas of science, but there was one paper that was hiding in pla…