Notes of Nagesh

  By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan Silicon can already out-calculate humanity. Whether it can out-think Newton is a different question entirely In the summer of 1665, with plague stalking London, a 23-year-old Isaac Newton retreated to his mother's farm in Lincolnshire and, by his own later account, invented a new branch of mathematics more or less out of boredom and ambition. He wanted to know how planets moved, how a falling apple related to an orbiting moon, how change itself could be measured. Calculus was the result: arguably humanity's most consequential intellectual export, the mathematics underneath rocket trajectories, economic models and the machine-learning systems that now threaten to make Newton's achievement look almost pedestrian by comparison. Three and a half centuries later, a rather different kind of mind is trying its hand at mathematics. Large Language Models can already prove theorems, some of them previously unsolved. DeepMind's AlphaProof reached silve...

For most people, the word "calculus" triggers a kind of academic vertigo. It marks the spot where the intuitive world of numbers hardens into a thicket of dry, mechanical symbols — a gatekeeper meant to be endured rather than a window meant to be looked through. We remember it as a series of hurdles. Steven Strogatz, a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell, remembers it as an epic. Strogatz is what you might call a mathematics mensch . Despite his world-class credentials, he still describes himself as the "weakest math major" of his Princeton years, watching classmates solve problems at a speed he couldn't match. That humility is what makes him such an effective translator of the subject. Whether he's walking the hills of Ithaca dictating chapters to his dog, Murray, or trading ideas on the Into the Impossible podcast, Strogatz treats mathematics as a matter of human history and feeling, not formula. For him, calculus isn't a textbook subject. I...

The data show a labour market bruised by many things. AI, so far, is a bit player BAD NEWS travels fast, and few stories travel faster these days than the one about robots coming for the cubicle. Layoffs at Coinbase, Meta and Cisco are cited as proof that a white-collar reckoning has begun. Yet a look at the actual figures tells a duller, more reassuring story: America's aggregate labour market shows scant sign of an AI-driven collapse. Unemployment among occupations most exposed to artificial intelligence is, if anything, lower than among those least exposed. Nor is there any sign of a mass migration from AI-threatened desk jobs to supposedly safer manual ones — the kind of shift one would expect if the robots really were coming. None of this means AI is harmless to workers. It means the disruption, if it is coming, has not yet shown up in the statistics that economists watch most closely. Slow-moving technology, fast-moving fears Erika McEntarfer, who ran the Bureau of ...

By Chuppal Nagesh Bhushan Few art forms possess the power to stir collective souls quite like music. In India, the ancient edifice of classical ragas—elaborate melodic systems steeped in emotion, season and spirituality—evolved from temple and court traditions into a potent instrument of nationalist awakening. Long before independence dawned in 1947, ragas helped forge a shared cultural identity, lending structure and emotional depth to the freedom struggle and leaving an indelible mark on the country’s patriotic vocabulary. As British colonial rule intensified in the late 19th century, Indian intellectuals turned to indigenous traditions for renewal. Classical music, with its rigorous grammar of notes (swaras), scales (ragas) and rhythmic cycles (talas), offered both continuity with a glorious past and flexibility for contemporary expression. Its capacity to evoke rasa—the aesthetic flavour of human feeling—proved singularly effective in awakening a sense of shared destiny among a div...

Walk into the boardrooms of India’s biggest private firms, private-equity offices and unicorn startups, and a striking pattern emerges. Nearly nine out of ten of the country’s leading CEOs, promoters and top business figures hail from a narrow segment of society: the Savarnas, chiefly Brahmins and Banias. This is not affirmative action gone awry. It is, its critics argue, the most enduring and least discussed reservation of all. A 2010 study of India’s 1,000 largest companies found that some 93% of board members came from “forward” castes. A 2012 analysis put the figure for board directors at around 91%. More recent reporting suggests little has changed at the top: upper castes continue to dominate senior leadership roles, while comprehensive official data remain elusive because few companies track caste in hiring or promotions. Hiring realities Discrimination is evident well below the C-suite. Multiple field experiments continue to show that equally qualified candida...

  The Buddha Behind the Katha: How a Bahujan YouTube Channel Is Retelling the Story of the Jataka Tales Every Saturday, a Hindi-language YouTube channel called Science Journey — an offshoot of the debate channel Rationalist World — puts on a different kind of program. Instead of live debates, the host sits down for a single long monologue aimed at families: children, elders, and "especially women," as he puts it, from India's Bahujan communities (Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC groups). The subject of the inaugural episode in this new series is one that rarely gets prime-time treatment: the Jataka tales, the centuries-old Buddhist birth-stories of the Bodhisattva — and the argument, advanced at length, that much of what is practiced today as "Hinduism" is Buddhism wearing a disguise. It's a provocative thesis, delivered with the pacing of a detective story. And whatever one makes of its politics, it offers a genuinely interesting tour through Buddhist textual ...