Wednesday, October 18, 2006
THE COMING OF THE AMERASIAN GLOBAL BOOM
A very interesting article in The New York Times, "The Emperor of Math" about star mathematician Dr. Shing-Tung Yau who teaches and researches at Harvard even as he attempts to cultivate future generations of Chinese mathematicians:
"For nine months of the year, Dr. Yau is a Harvard math professor, best known for inventing the mathematical structures known as Calabi-Yau spaces that underlie string theory, the supposed “theory of everything.” In 1982 he won a Fields Medal, the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Dr. Yau can be found holding court in the Yenching restaurant in Harvard Square or off the math library in his cramped office, where the blackboard is covered with equations and sketches of artfully chopped-up doughnuts.
But the other three months he is what his friend Andrew Strominger, a Harvard physicist, called “the emperor ascendant of Chinese science,” one of the most prominent of the “overseas Chinese” who return home every summer to work, teach, lobby, inspire and feud like warlords in an effort to advance world-class science in China. "
Yau is the harbinger of things to come - a growing generation of Chinese and Indian immigrants and their descendants who use their world class Ameican university educations to become the catalysts of human capital " back home", that never quite becomes " home" again. They will be joined in the next two decades by increasing numbers of Koreans, Malays, Thais and Vietnamese who will become a cycle of intellect linking East and West, enriching the world with ideas and enterprises. ¶ 7:48 PM
A very interesting article in The New York Times, "The Emperor of Math" about star mathematician Dr. Shing-Tung Yau who teaches and researches at Harvard even as he attempts to cultivate future generations of Chinese mathematicians:
"For nine months of the year, Dr. Yau is a Harvard math professor, best known for inventing the mathematical structures known as Calabi-Yau spaces that underlie string theory, the supposed “theory of everything.” In 1982 he won a Fields Medal, the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Dr. Yau can be found holding court in the Yenching restaurant in Harvard Square or off the math library in his cramped office, where the blackboard is covered with equations and sketches of artfully chopped-up doughnuts.
But the other three months he is what his friend Andrew Strominger, a Harvard physicist, called “the emperor ascendant of Chinese science,” one of the most prominent of the “overseas Chinese” who return home every summer to work, teach, lobby, inspire and feud like warlords in an effort to advance world-class science in China. "
Yau is the harbinger of things to come - a growing generation of Chinese and Indian immigrants and their descendants who use their world class Ameican university educations to become the catalysts of human capital " back home", that never quite becomes " home" again. They will be joined in the next two decades by increasing numbers of Koreans, Malays, Thais and Vietnamese who will become a cycle of intellect linking East and West, enriching the world with ideas and enterprises. ¶ 7:48 PM
