Losing it

"Education is hanging around until you've caught on." ~ Robert Frost

Well, I had a bitter-sweet end to the last week. I did win a round of the Math Quiz I attended at Royal College at Mira Road, but came back empty handed from the seminar-presentation competition. I am not proud of the trophy I won because the round I won was probably the easiest and I don't think it deserved a special prize separately. I guess I lost the previous round based on geometry by a whisker. I knew in my bones that I would ace that round 'coz geometry was my favourite subject in school. We had a geometry paper in ninth and tenth grades. In ninth I fell in love with that subject and I was extremely good at it, I topped my class in that subject. In tenth I had decided that I am not going to tank a single mark in that subject, and I didn't. In the later exams I scored full marks in all the prelims and even the Secondary School Certificate Examination, the boards. I am quite proud of those marks and I still remember the last four questions in geometry. I cracked them with quite an ease.

But I feel very bad about losing the seminar-presentation competition. Our college had sent two teams and I represented one team; and we deserved both the first and second prize. My friend Anand and I were the first two to present and we presented our topics, Construction of an ordered field that is not Archimedean and the Brachistochrone Problem, extremely well and were quite sure that we would win. The others were quite pedestrian in the way they presented their topics and many were not even suited for the undergraduate level. Too many of them were quite elementary like Colouring in Graph Theory and Array Sorting. They could not even answer the questions asked by the judges. We felt that those who won did not deserve to win at all and none of them could even match the breadth of our knowledge of math. They were not even good with their speech articulation. It was so bad. But we lost. Fuck!

But I guess that just reflects the state of education of our degree colleges here in Bombay and elsewhere in Maharashtra. And the syllabus stresses more on the rigours of pure mathematics. Many people cannot cope up with the abstract approach to mathematics at the undergraduate level. There is a talk that the University is going to revamp the syllabus and make it more application oriented. Which means it is going to be more in the area of applied mathematics rather than pure maths. But this means that students who wish to pursue research will have it very difficult studying beyond the syllabus. I think it would be better if the university comes up with two separate degrees in pure and applied mathematics. The applied math degree could be more industry and job oriented and the pure math degree could be more research oriented. The papers in the first year should have mix of both, so students can choose which degree to pursue based on their aptitude for research which could be examined on the basis of a university level examination. I just hope the guys on the Board of Studies for Mathematics do not screw around with the education.

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