Kaushik Basu
@kaushikcbasu
Professor of Economics, Cornell University, & former Chief Economist of the World Bank & Chief Economic Adviser, Government of India.
List of philosophers who never got married: Nietzsche, Adam Smith, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Kant, Voltaire, Hume, Leibnitz, Newton, Spinoza, Locke, Descartes, Hobbes, Aquinas, Plato, Epicurus, Shankaracharya, Confucius, Swedenborg, Thoreau. I stop because it’s 280
Fun fact: Émile Borel was the first to introduce the Colonel Blotto game… and later became Navy Minister. Did his game theory help? Who knows 😅
It’s 100 years since Emile Borel became a minister in the French government. He was an amazing person. One of the founding fathers of game theory, he contributed to several fields of mathematics & was politically active as a member of the Radical Socialist Party of France.
It’s 100 years since Emile Borel became a minister in the French government. He was an amazing person. One of the founding fathers of game theory, he contributed to several fields of mathematics & was politically active as a member of the Radical Socialist Party of France.
Beautiful🙏 If the population has to have all types, then there would be 2 ten cent coins. 10x+5y+z=75 & x+y+z=49. This takes it to 9x+4y=26. So both x & y would have values of 2. Did I get it correct Sir?
Eve has 50 coins which add up to one dollar. At least one of those coins is a quarter (25 cents). How many ten cent coins does Eve have? (Remember coins can be for 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents and 25 cents.)
Syracuse, Sicily. Archimedes lived, worked & died close to here. When in 212 BC the Roman soldier who eventually killed him approached him it’s believed Archimedes pleaded not for his life but for the soldier to not destroy the geometric shapes he had drawn in the sand.
Good bye to Mount Etna & the Strait of Messina. This is roughly where Vivekananda sailing in 1897 was stunned by nature’s beauty, & noting that beauty is what the observer perceives, he jokingly told sister Nivedita, “Messina must thank me. It is I who give her all her beauty.”
The trick now is to use GDP to describe a nation’s goat domestic population.
Once this falls into the hands of government propagandists we’ve had it.
Once this falls into the hands of government propagandists we’ve had it.
My sketch of Ozzy Osbourne from 10 years ago. May he rest in peace.
University of Catania, Sicily. One of the oldest universities in the world. Founded in 1434.
Beautiful Sicily. As one walks in these streets its a fascinating thought that Archimedes lived in the region & this is the birthplace of pi.
On 21 July, 1977, in Kolkata. Exactly 48 years later, on 21 July, 2025, in Siracusa, Sicily.
Which city? Which country? 3 clues. This is not easy. Think hard.
Religion & research both arise from the same human urge to understand the mystery of life. The religious people are the clever ones who quickly give up & embrace blind faith. Researchers struggle to find the answer till the end of their lives.
Am sitting in a by-lane & re-reading Vivekananda’s letters. Fascinating. They show his wanderlust, his joy in meeting all kinds of people, his humor, also his vulnerabilities, & above all, his love of humanity. His Hinduism was so different from what some Hindutva groups teach.
Swami Vivekananda in his letter to Mary Hale, while sailing through the Mediterranean: “What am I? Asiatic, European or American? I feel a curious medley of personalities in me.”