LOSS OF CERTAINTY - REVIEW OF SURI AND BAL'S "A CERTAIN AMBIGUITY"

Every thinking human being tries to build his or her worldview from the store of his or her own experiences or by drawing upon one's reasoning powers or by drinking from the fount of existing wisdom and knowledge. Every human being has a personal philosophy of life and existence even if it were not as sophisticated as that of, say, Bertrand Russell.

Shakespeare has memorably stated: "There are more things in heaven and Earth,..., than are dreamt of in your philosophy." There may come a time in one's life when this worldview gets shattered and one desperately clings to some beliefs, any beliefs. As they say, Nature abhors a vacuum. Some may become devoutly religious, some may become atheists or agnostics, some may find solace in, say, Spinoza's philosophy or Nietzsche's philosophy.

LETTERS ABOUT MATH - REVIEW OF STEVEN STROGATZ'S "THE CALCULUS OF FRIENDSHIP"

Steven Strogatz is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, USA and a well known popularizer of mathematics (along the lines of another great mathematics teacher Ian Stewart). I loved Strogatz's book Sync (2003) which dealt with the topic of synchronization of complex systems in a very readable manner. His research focuses on chaos and complexity and he is famous for coauthoring a 1998 Nature paper on "small-world" networks.

In his book The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life While Corresponding about Math (2009), Strogatz explores the thirty year correspondence he maintained with his high school math teacher Don Joffray.