Vijee Venkatraman
Queen of Carbon
Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus, of Lincoln Laboratory, who has achieved prominence as a solid-state physicist has been appointed Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, read a small news item in the Boston Globe on 8 October, 1967. The appointment was...
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Blue: In Search of Nature’s Rarest Color
The first time he saw the colour, M.A. Subramanian could not believe his eyes. The U.S.-based professor had asked a graduate student to grind a trio of dull oxides and bake the mixture at around 1,200° Celsius. The goal was to make a multiferroic or...
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A Quantum Life
They called him “The Professor.” By the time he was ten years old, he was reading every book he could get his hands on. In sixth grade, he scored 162 on an I.Q. test. But, by the time he was in his teens, the...
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Nenendu Vethugudura
Karukurichi Arunachalam, the legendary player of the nagaswaram, a wood-wind instrument of South India, was born in 1921, in Tamil Nadu. He died at the age of 43. In the year of Arunachalam’s 100th birth anniversary, I came across a moving short story about him, Nenendu Vethugudura, based on an incident from his short life. If Arunachalam was a virtuoso, turns out,...
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The Power of Language
At the pediatrician’s clinic, a nurse told Viorica Marian, who is a native speaker of Romanian, to use only English with her American-born daughter. Speaking another language would “confuse” the child and hurt her long-term, the woman had said. This was a good decade ago....
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