Notes from my interaction with Dr. Kannan Soundararajan, Infosys Prize winner

My article on this interview and Dr. Soundararajan's opinions appeared in The Hindu's EducationPlus supplement on October 22, 2012 titled "It's a mixed bag".

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Dr. Kannan Soundararajan is a professor at Stanford University and the director of its Mathematics Research Center. He is a recipient of the Infosys Prize for the Mathematical Sciences, the Ostrowski Prize (both in 2011), the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2005), and the inaugural Morgan Prize (1995). Dr. Soundararajan's research interests concern L-functions and multiplicative number theory.

Here are some excerpts from my interview with him (My comments appear in square-brackets).

You've been awarded the Infosys Prize in the mathematical sciences category in 2011 for your work in number theory. Could you explain the nature of your work?

I work with Riemann zeta-functions, which are used to encode properties of integers and prime numbers together [Bernhard Riemann observed about 150 years ago that the properties of primes could be studied with this function].

As the director of the Mathematics Research Center at Stanford University, may I ask what your responsibilities are?

I am responsible for administering funds received from the university. We also bring in 40 to 50 visitors every year to the department of mathematics for seminars.

Further, we encourage research collaborations by inviting and paying for researchers from outside the university. There are also lecture series, and the conduction of outreach activities for undergraduate and high-school students.

Do you think there's sufficient encouragement for students to pursue a career in pure research? Have you seen this interest decline in the last five or so years?

There is lots of enthusiasm for students going from school to college these days. We encourage some of those students to take up summertime research with university professors. Moreover, our proximity to Silicon Valley helps because it draws in a lot of people interested in pure-mathematics research. There is also an increasing interest in the subject due to the export of problems from computer science.

Because of these factors and some others, there has been an increase in the number of mathematics majors by nine times in eight yrs! Another important way for us to judge the interest of our students is through their participation in extracurricular activities.

As far as teaching the technical sciences is concerned, do you think there are any shortcomings in the education system - in the West and in India?

Classroom education is in a period of flux. Online education is changing things for the future.

The most successful model has been one that involved one-to-one interactions along with small class-sizes, but that is bound to change as classes grow bigger. Also, with an increasingly interdisciplinary nature of courses in the mix, balancing online courses with interactive sessions in the classroom is necessary.

I believe that this evolution will continue for the next five to ten years before it stabilizes.

With budget cuts by states around the world, big experimental physics has taken a hit. This isn't to say theoretical research thrives - in fact, the public has always had trouble understanding the latter. So, in the current economic scene, what're the ways in which the government can be convinced that advanced mathematics also deserves investment?

A good question.

A lot of solutions in various fields have spun out of advanced mathematics research. There is an increase in the number of problems being exported by computer science. Mathematics has for a long time been influenced by problems in physics, and vice-versa, but now, computer science has come to assume that mantle.

Further, advanced mathematics research has grown to become a huge field by itself now, and has come to influence many aspects of life. The give-and-take between fields continues to happen: as one grows, the other does, too. Pure mathematics now shares connections with other sciences, most recently with biology.

Although it might be difficult to see physical results of pure-mathematics research in the short-run, they will become visible with time. In fact, such benefits have always been hard to foretell, but they have been there all the same.

Do you think the Infosys Foundation and others like it are doing enough to offset this imbalance?

Science research in India is still funded in large parts by the government. Around the world, the trend has been toward using private funding for research, especially in light of the economic recession. For example, in the USA, the Simons Foundation has started to contribute for many research initiatives.

So, where public spending has gone down, foundations like Infosys' are doing good work. The influx of private funding for science research is welcome.

In terms of your research, what're you looking at next?

I am working on a couple of books, one on the Riemann zeta-function and the other on quantum unique ergodicity. Both are aimed at graduate students.

The architecture of access

Technology percolates into our lives through three prongs that are supported and sustained by various institutions and organizations from around the world. They are distribution, content development, and information production. Once any object or entity is conceived, it becomes a source of information to those who will be using it. To make it more attractive, it is shaped and presented in a manner that incentivizes its purchase. Finally, to get it across to as broad an audience as possible, it is marketed and distributed through various channels.

The distribution stage is the most important of the three stages for two reasons. The first reason is that distribution is the symbolic satiation of needs. The second reason is that effective distribution creates awareness and necessitates competition and betterment. Therefore, products have to be conveyed to users as quickly and effortlessly as possible—which is what Open Access seeks to accomplish.

The underpinning motivation of Open Access (OA) is to make knowledge freely available to everyone, especially to those who work with limited access to libraries and other resources. Specifically, OA is said to have been implemented when peer-reviewed journal articles are available for free to anyone who wishes to use their intellectual property as long as credit is given where it is due. The protocol enhances research by bringing reports and articles to those who might not have been able to access it without OA’s mandates in place. It promotes citations and encourages more new work to be built upon the old ones, speeding up innovation and development.

Evidently, those wishing to implement OA must be research-minded more than commercially inclined. There are, of course, merits and demerits that come with its implementation. The most lucrative merit is that OA journals reduce publication delays by focusing on making submissions more accessible. The most formidable deterrents are the monetary concerns: OA journals shift the burden of payment from readers to authors.

Instead of being paid for accepting articles, OA journals earn by charging authors, their employers and/or the research funders for getting their papers peer-reviewed. This is a charge that the research community must bear in order to assure users that what they will be reading is good-quality information: the message is “if you want your work to be developed quickly, pay up.”

However, such charges are easily surpassed by the increased probability of a work being cited if it is brought under the OA umbra—an observation supported by various studies. The latest, conducted in 2010, further noted that articles liberated by OA benefited not from authors self-selecting which articles to make freely accessible but by users selecting which articles to cite. This is a reflection of the fact that the more an article is accessible to being cited, the more it will be cited. (Interestingly, the study also found that citations followed the pareto principle: the top 20 per cent of all articles, graded by quality, received 80 per cent of all the citations.)

There are two ways to make an article openly accessible. In the first way, the authors publish their article in an OA journal, thereby taking the “golden” road to publication. Such journals include the New Journal of Physics, the New England Journal of Medicine, PubMed Central, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). A processing fee may or may not be applicable; this varies from journal to journal (PNAS charges a whopping $975).

The other way is to take the “green” road and self-archive it: authors themselves choose an appropriate archiving resource, such as CiteSeer (by the University of Pennsylvania) for computer and information scientists and arXiv (by Cornell University) for physicists, and upload their articles for viewing. Since these authors also publish to journals for accruing credibility, it is advisable for them to look up the journal’s self-archiving policies before going down the “green road”.

Once the knowledge lying locked within journals has been unlocked by OA, readers can avail a bevy of concepts and numbers at their fingertips. Since journals play host to all kinds of studies—not just scientific—OA’s potential is best understood in terms of the macroeconomic development of the community it targets. It is not just about a bunch of scientists sitting around a laptop and siphoning off citations for their next big paper. Instead, it is about nations identifying the strengths and opportunities for further developments and recognizing potential partners worldwide who will shape funding, advocacy and support for regional initiatives. It is about promoting art and cultural programmes and encouraging structural changes in socio-economic policy to introduce greater freedom—of expression as well as thought.

Of course, OA is more powerful if it exists within a constitutional mandate (especially one that has brokered an agreement with a one-stop repository that makes accessing important research developments easier for everyone). For example, in April 2006, the European Commission, in a report titled ‘Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe’, recommended that “Research funding agencies should establish a European policy mandating published articles arising from EC-funded research to be available after a given time period in open access archives.” This recommendation was further strengthened by the European Research Advisory Board, which mandated that all such articles must be immediately deposited in OA repositories after they are published, and enforced a 6-month deadline upon deposition by which the paper had to be made open-access.

In India, however, the absence of a national mandate on OA publishing has resulted in Indian works becoming less accessible. Consequently, because of reduced paper visibility and a poor subscriber base, Indian scientists prefer to publish their works in foreign journals in order to increase academic impact. In fact, there are only 822 OA-archived papers in and from India (Full list here). Needless to say, this is a vicious cycle in the academic community that must be weeded out, and the only way to do so would be to compel publishers to make OA-versions of papers available, even if after a short delay.

The implementation of OA does have its fair share of critics, however, whose remarks range from questioning the need for a free-access mandate to arguing against paying taxes to get papers published instead of to buy access to them. The latter could be a valid argument in countries that publicly fund research—implying that federal grants are rendered pointless by researchers having to shell out money anyway—if one were to exclude the issue of access: currently, publicly funded research is indeed accessible, but only in national libraries and (offline) institutional repositories. The principle of OA is to make this access more widespread, but the argument does highlight the need for cheaper processing fees to deter marginalized research groups from entering mainstream discussion fora.

The thermodynamics of research

Combing through media reports from the 1980s looking for a mention of Shechtman's discovery of quasi-periodic crystals. NYTimes and Guardian sites from the 1980s won't open quickly enough - fucked up internet connection slows down whenever it rains. And then have to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn so I can start writing the proposal for my dissertation.

The start is always the boring part, always has been the boring part for many things in this universe, as if nature has a proclivity to be inconducive toward whatever causes an increase in entropy. Ah, thermodynamics.

Stocks are running low. Long night ahead.

Philosophiae homis

The 'Book Summary' makes me wonder... why are the likes of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman so few and so far in between? The popularization of science may not seem like a necessary fixture to its acceptance in mainstream media, but over the years it has become increasingly necessary to clarify its role in the eyes of the common man—even roles such as those played in the maintenance of the Large Hadron Collider or of the International Space Station. That Einstein's papers on special and general relativity need a "redesigning" betokens a moment's reflection on the dependence of our day-to-day activities on scientific research and development, whether the increasing investment in experimental apparatuses sees justification just like military spending does, and if anyone ascribes the need for that investment to anything apart from science's utilitarian value.

Philosophiae homis

The 'Book Summary' makes me wonder... why are the likes of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman so few and so far in between? The popularization of science may not seem like a necessary fixture to its acceptance in mainstream media, but over the years it has become increasingly necessary to clarify its role in the eyes of the common man—even roles such as those played in the maintenance of the Large Hadron Collider or of the International Space Station. That Einstein's papers on special and general relativity need a "redesigning" betokens a moment's reflection on the dependence of our day-to-day activities on scientific research and development, whether the increasing investment in experimental apparatuses sees justification just like military spending does, and if anyone ascribes the need for that investment to anything apart from science's utilitarian value.