This post is about how it is important to avoid taking rigid pedagogical attitudes while teaching. Having associated with academia (as a student and a professor) for almost 50 years now, I have come across several teachers who proclaim various types of unbending attitudes which they sincerely believe in and proudly implement in the classroom. I feel these actions are sub-optimal, if not downright disastrous for some students, as teaching is an art which requires open and fle

This post is a review of the book D. D. Kosambi: One Life, Many Worlds by Ram Ramaswamy, an academic whose own research lies in nonlinear science and computational biology. As the name suggests, the book is a biography. Kosambi was a polymath, making original and distinguished contributions to mathematics (e.g. Kosambi-Cartan-Chern theory, which analyzes second-order differential equations), genetics (e.g. the Kosambi mapping function), numismatics, (Marxist) history, literat

This post is a review of the book Crick: A Mind in Motion by Matthew Cobb. I found three motivations, not in order of importance, for reading and reviewing this book. First, after covering a biography of Watson, I thought it would be appropriate to read and review a bio of Crick. Second, this biography advertised i