Tables & Figures

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My son is off to Gaithersburg (MD) on one of his short Business Trips (which he doesn't enjoy anymore.....he will miss his daughter Ishani).

He tells me that Parag is a post-doc there.

This reminds me of a weak interaction (on and off over a couple of decades till I retired) with a scientist.

It started with a reprint request on a picture post card from him for one of my Papers in AJP. The picture was beautiful and it was under the glass sheet on my table (not Table) till I quit KGP. He used to ask me for more reprints by and by and I was curious about him...there were very few reprint requests for any of my Papers except one for which there were about 60 from all over the globe.....I peeled off the stamps for my son and found that the most beautiful stamps are from the least known countries and the worst are from the most well-known; may be there is a correlation there, philatelists should know.

One day I got a huge packet from him, opening which I found it was mostly Tables and Tables....if I recall well, about Radiation Dosimetry....how many units of Gamma rays or X-rays are to be given to whatever cancer (my wife had to undergo mild doses of this thing last year...but nowadays it is all computerized).

He then wrote his first letter to me saying cutely that if anyone wants to become famous and rich, the thing to do is to compile and publish Tables.

I didn't realize this although, for half a century from my father's graduation from Madras Christian College with Physics as a Subsidiary subject to mine as Main from Andhra University, Clark's Mathematical and Physical Tables were as compulsory a first buy as Worsnop & Flint for our Physics Lab. The thing was slim and started with Logarithms and Antilogarithms (4-figure; there were 7-figure ones for our Spectroscopy Labs... all as extinct now as dinosaurs); and went on to Trigonometric Functions, Natural and Hyperbolic; and then to Universal Constants and Properties of solids, liquids and gases.

But Clark's Tables were rather inadequate for our Lab which required, say, the viscosity of Indian castor oil at various temperatures: a well-known experiment that fetched me good marks in my Final Year (by the way PoLtS thanks his 4th Year Lab Grade which he says made his CGPA look decent). Or surface tension of Visakhapatnam seaside tap-water at different brine concentrations.

So by our Final Year we had a new booklet of Tables by Seshadri which became very popular and perhaps made him rich and famous too. It was bulkier than Clark's and much more user-friendly although I don't know what happened to it later on...must have disappeared like the Tyrannosaurus (Google gives me the Railway Time Tables for Seshadri Express from Bangalore to Kakinada). "Clark's Tables" (within quotes) gives 1410 results...they must have gone online.

Anyway, reverting to my pen-friend, just before I left KGP I got a huge bunch of all the Dosimetry Tables ever compiled by him, accompanied by a quaint request and a form to be filled in by me seeking nomination in his favor for the upcoming Nobel in Medicine (I don't know if he got it yet).

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We now come to the well-known Time Table at Physics Department at IIT KGP for which I was the ever-unwilling In-Charge for two years during the Emergency and made many needles enemies. During my tenure 35 years ago these were hand-drawn unlike the online ones that appeared towards my end there.

I recall one amusing incident connected with TT during the brief 1-year tenure of SDM as HoD when Prof S was the TT-in-Charge.

Till then there were just 3 Final Year Electives (equal to the number of Full Profs). The 15-odd students were forced to take one or the other in equal measure such that there was no heart-burn for any of the 3 Profs, viz. 5 in each Elective (the least interesting was the most fetching....some correlation again?)

But SDM wanted to democratize the system and called for all Electives which ANY teacher wished to offer, and 3 choices from all 15 students.

With the result that there were 7 Electives offered, and 45 choices from the students, 2 sets of Free Periods and 3 available Class Rooms.

When I entered his Office one evening, SDM was quietly chuckling one of his famous chuckles. And the reason was that apparently Prof S revolted and declined to do the coveted and powerful TT-in-Chargeship anymore because he found it impossible to accommodate all choices with all the constraints imposed by the needless democratization, and dumped all the papers in SDM's lap.

And SDM told me with a gleeful smile: "He should have drawn a diagram, otherwise how can he proceed?"

And showed me his Solution to the Problem which he claimed he arrived at in 5 minutes with his SDM-Diagram (like Feynman Diagrams?).

And this from a chap who refused to have any diagram appear in any one of his Papers till I joined him and forced him to acquiesce because there was a beautiful diagram that improved the look of one of our Joint Papers by a factor of 10.

And my two crucial interactions with him were those in which he asked me to draw first an ellipse, and then a parabola!

SDM was a veritable chela of Whittaker (the one who gave all credit of Relativity to his unwilling mathematician-friend Poincare rather then the self-effacing Einstein). MSS dubbed this reluctance to include diagrams as an example of die-hard British intellectual aristocracy:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/07/get-up-please.html

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When Pratik and Aniket graciously visited us with their families this summer, Pratik told me, rather gaily, that the famous Physicist P has recently published a fat book on a famous subject without a single diagram.

I then narrated a rather vicious joke doing the rounds in our youth that P closed his Office and bolted it for an hour everyday; and one of his several almirahs was found permanently locked, unlike the others.

Fans of his rival Feynman spread the word that P used to draw Feynman Diagrams during that one hour, lock them up in this almirah, and write all his Papers using Feynman Diagrams dropping them from his manuscripts.

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I myself am like Alice who asks: "What is the use of a book that has no pictures?"


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