MB the human being

Their computer calculations stopped at 10 spins. 2 Indian physicists found an answer that was not limited to those 10. Bombay, 1969. Chanchal Kumar Majumdar and his research student Dipan Ghosh were working at TIFR on a problem about how matter behaves at the quantum level. Think of spins as tiny magnets. Put them in a ring. Each interacts with its neighbour, but also with the next one along. Those competing interactions make it difficult to work out the arrangement with the lowest energy. And adding more spins makes the calculation grow rapidly. You cannot simply solve 10 and assume a much larger ring will behave the same way. Their numerical study on TIFR's CDC 3600 was limited to rings of 4, 6, 8 and 10 spins. But inside those small calculations, Majumdar and Ghosh spotted a clue. As they changed the balance between the 2 interactions, the energy curves for the different ring sizes seemed to pass through the same point. Four spins. Six. Eight. Ten. The same energy per spin at one particular balance. Ghosh later wrote: "This indicated existence of an exact answer." They worked out a simple pairing pattern: neighbouring spins joined into pairs, each pair with total spin zero. Shift all the pairs by one position and you get a second pattern. When the 2nd interaction was exactly half the first, both patterns were exact solutions. Their mathematics worked for general even sized rings, far beyond the little systems they had calculated on the computer. That was the remarkable part. They had recognised a structure in a handful of numbers and worked out why it held beyond those examples. There was one remaining question: could another arrangement have still lower energy? J. Pasupathy supplied the mathematical lower bound, reported in 1970. Nothing could sit below their answer. These really were the lowest-energy states. Today it is called the Majumdar-Ghosh model. The name sounds like another chapter in a physics textbook. Behind it were a professor and his student in Bombay, finding an exact answer to an interacting quantum problem from calculations on rings of just 4 to 10 spins. Sources: C.K. Majumdar and D.K. Ghosh, Journal of Mathematical Physics 10, 1388 and 1399 (1969); J. Pasupathy, Proceedings of the DAE Symposium 13C, 753 (1970); D.K. Ghosh, Indian Journal of Physics 80(6), 577-581 (2006). Photo 1: Chanchal Kumar Majumdar, with his signature, from his INSA memoir. Photo 2: Dipan Ghosh, photographed in 2008. Photo 3: TIFR's CDC 3600 computer room. Their small-spin calculations ran on this computer. Photo 4: The numerical plot and the sentence "This indicated existence of an exact answer", p.580 of Ghosh's 2006 review. The right column also credits Pasupathy's lower-bound proof.

236 years ago, a maths prof. at Edinburgh said: "there had arisen a NEWTON among the Brahmins." Let us hear that story.... In the 1760s, a French astronomer in Tamil Nadu watched local astronomers compute eclipses. No telescopes.... The numbers lived inside sentence-phrases called vakyas: each phrase doubled as a precise planetary constant, built to be memorised. Guillaume Le Gentil copied the tables and they reached Paris, where the astronomer Bailly published them in 1787. Europe started arguing. 3 years later, John Playfair, prof. of mathematics at Edinburgh, took up the tables himself. He began as a skeptic. The Brahmins, he wrote, had handed Europe "means, almost infallible, of detaching their imposture": modern astronomy could now calculate the sky backwards and test the tables' claim of ancient observations. Then he ran the test. 9 elements of the Tamil tables matched Europe's most modern values. The moon's acceleration. The changing rate of precession. Even the ratio of circumference to diameter built into the tables, 3927 to 1250, works out to 3.1416 - the value Aryabhata had given in 499 CE. Playfair's verdict: either the observations behind these tables were made more than 3000 years before Christ, "or, what is still more wonderful, some ages ago, there had arisen a Newton among the Brahmins." The 2nd part never quite went away. The vakya system is a real method: exact planetary constants encoded as poetry, carried intact across centuries. Modern historians of astronomy have reconstructed it and found the mathematics sound. The vakkiya panchangam in Tamil homes today still runs on it. Sources: John Playfair, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 2 (1790); J.S. Bailly, Traite de l'astronomie indienne (1787); O. Neugebauer, "Tamil Astronomy", Osiris, vol. 10 (1952); L. Gislen, Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage (2023). Image Source: Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. 2 (1790), via Internet Archive. Public domain; highlight added. Photo 1:Playfair's 1790 paper, p. 152, highlighted: the Brahmins had handed Europe "means, almost infallible, of detecting their imposture" Photo 2: Page 169, highlighted: "no less than nine astronomical elements" matching - with his footnote listing all nine, including the moon's acceleration and the inequality of precession. Above it, Laplace finding Saturn's and Jupiter's motions at the Indian epoch matching the tables to the arcminute. Photo 3: Page 187, highlighted: the Newton sentence, exactly as printed - "there had arisen a NEWTON among the Brahmins... and a DE LA GRANGE, to trace... its most subtle and complicated operations."

This is the fantastic story of a doctor who used to stand in a hospital corridor, asking passing surgeons to help him operate on brains. Let us know the story of Dr. Balasubramaniam Ramamurthi... On Vijayadasami, October 1950, he started a neurosurgery unit at Madras General Hospital with 4 borrowed beds in a general surgical ward. He was 28. He had trained in Newcastle under G.F. Rowbotham and spent 4 months with Wilder Penfield in Montreal. Back in Madras, there was almost nothing for neurosurgery. Some of the instruments for opening the skull had been bought with money he saved in Britain...🙏🙏 Patients came late. In his recollection, 80% of those with brain tumours were already blind. 1 in 3 patients died soon after surgery in those early years. He wrote about the courage it took to return to the ward the next morning and ask the next patient to agree to an operation. The unit slowly acquired its own ward and operating theatre. Radiologists and anaesthetists joined. In 1960, Madras and Vellore began a 2 year neurosurgery course for surgeons already qualified in general surgery. V. Balasubramanian was the 1st candidate at Madras. One of the people Ramamurthi later trained was T.S. Kanaka... She had struggled through years of discrimination in general surgery. With him, she found a teacher who let her operate. She finished her neurosurgical training in 1968 and became Asia's 1st fully qualified woman neurosurgeon. His team was doing stereotactic brain surgery before it had a CT scanner. In 1967, the hospital opened a separate head-injury ward, the 1st of its kind in India. The 4 bed unit grew into the Madras Institute of Neurology, formally opened in 1972. It was not India's 1st neurosurgery department. Jacob Chandy had started one at Vellore in 1949. Today, nobody has to leave the country to learn how to open a skull. Some stories are about the first. This one is about the ones who built the rest. 🙏🙏 Sources: P.N. Tandon's personal reminiscences, Neurology India (2018); K. Sridhar, "The legend and his legacy" (2004); Madras Medical College; MMC Alumni's T.S. Kanaka biography. Photo: Dr. Ramamurthi in surgical dress, studying a brain atlas inside the operating theatre at Madras General Hospital. The Neurology India journal identifies the book as Schaltenbrand and Bailey's 1959 stereotactic atlas and dates the photograph to the late 1950s / 1960s. Stereotaxy means locating targets inside the brain using a precise coordinate system.