For the past two days it snowed so much in Portland that I could not venture out for a walk, afraid of slipping and falling. In Toledo the land is flat with care one could venture out but Portland has so many steep ups and downs that it is scary. Our driveway is so steep I have to tumble down fast to avoid falling!
This brings back the memories of my very first encounter with this white stuff. That was the early morning of October 26th, 1966 in Moscow, USSR! Let me tell you the story behind this. How a lad from Tenali, India where temperature never goes below 60 degrees Fahrenheit end up so far north of all places in Russia?
That was in the summer of 1966. I was employed at the TIFR doing research in Mathematics and my domain was complex analysis but it is not specific yet which part of that huge subject I would specialize in. I was reading all sorts of things but at tat time I was studying the Theory of Approximations. One particular theorem captured me, a theorem proved by S. N. Mergelyan, a Soviet mathematician. I was talking excitedly about this marvelous theorem of Mergelyan to my senior colleagues one of whom said that Mergelyan is coming to TIFR(the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) and he would lecture for a few weeks on this subject. Further I could write down his lecture notes for a future publication. How lucky one could be?
At the end of one of those lectures he posed some open problems one of which I solved that night and presented the proof to him. This problem was referred to as "the Swiss cheese problem", we shall return to it some time later. He was so impressed with it that he invited me to Moscow to work with him. I come from a family of workers, most of my uncles were bricklayers and my father was a manufacturer of cement bricks and also a contractor to build roads. They were communist sympathizers. So I had some curiosity about the Soviets and wanted to take up the invitation of the Russian professor. Most people at TIFR prefer to go to the western countries because there is no need to learn a new language and the pay is in dollars, a convertible currency. With USSR I have to learn Russian and the ruble is not convertible, cannot be brought home to help my family. But my curiosity about a communist society and my admiration for Mergelyan's theorem won over me in the end.
This brings back the memories of my very first encounter with this white stuff. That was the early morning of October 26th, 1966 in Moscow, USSR! Let me tell you the story behind this. How a lad from Tenali, India where temperature never goes below 60 degrees Fahrenheit end up so far north of all places in Russia?
That was in the summer of 1966. I was employed at the TIFR doing research in Mathematics and my domain was complex analysis but it is not specific yet which part of that huge subject I would specialize in. I was reading all sorts of things but at tat time I was studying the Theory of Approximations. One particular theorem captured me, a theorem proved by S. N. Mergelyan, a Soviet mathematician. I was talking excitedly about this marvelous theorem of Mergelyan to my senior colleagues one of whom said that Mergelyan is coming to TIFR(the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) and he would lecture for a few weeks on this subject. Further I could write down his lecture notes for a future publication. How lucky one could be?
At the end of one of those lectures he posed some open problems one of which I solved that night and presented the proof to him. This problem was referred to as "the Swiss cheese problem", we shall return to it some time later. He was so impressed with it that he invited me to Moscow to work with him. I come from a family of workers, most of my uncles were bricklayers and my father was a manufacturer of cement bricks and also a contractor to build roads. They were communist sympathizers. So I had some curiosity about the Soviets and wanted to take up the invitation of the Russian professor. Most people at TIFR prefer to go to the western countries because there is no need to learn a new language and the pay is in dollars, a convertible currency. With USSR I have to learn Russian and the ruble is not convertible, cannot be brought home to help my family. But my curiosity about a communist society and my admiration for Mergelyan's theorem won over me in the end.
