Willy Painiaye Willy
Païniaye wilpai
Hello world!
Welcome to
the Personal Site of
Willy Subbayya-Kanakasabhai
Painiaye
willy païniaye / willy painiaye
for what shall I wield a
dagger, o lord?
what can I pluck it
out of
or plunge it into
when you are all the
world?
Devar Dasimayya
10th century Indian
poet-saint
Malus sieversii
Malus sieversii has previously been identified as the main
contributor to the genome of the cultivated apple (Malus domestica),
on the basis of morphological, molecular, and historical evidence.
Fruit traits including crispness, more flavour intensity and fruit
weight have undergone differential selection by humans to produce
Malus domestica as seen today. The dispersal of M. sieversii and its
progeny throughout history can be attributed to the Silk Road.[13] A
DNA analysis in 2010 confirmed M. sieversii as the progenitor of the
cultivated apple. It has a highly variable genetic diversity
therefore it is the genetic source for abiotic and biotic stress
tolerance, many disease resistance and unique fruit traits.
Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan, and formerly its capital,
derives its name from the Kazakh word for "apple" (Alma), and is
often translated as "full of apples" (the region surrounding Almaty
is home to forests of Malus sieversii); alma is also "apple"
in other Turkic languages, as well as in Hungarian.
WIKIPEDIA
This World is Perfect
Is it not a blasphemy to say that the world needs our help? We
cannot deny that there is much misery in it; to go out and help
others is, therefore, the best thing we can do, although in the long
run, we shall find that helping others is only helping ourselves.
[…]
Life is good or evil according to the state of mind in which we
look at it, it is neither by itself. Fire, by itself, is neither
good nor evil. When it keeps us warm we say, "How beautiful is
fire!" When it burns our fingers, we blame it. Still, in itself it
is neither good nor bad. According as we use it, it produces in us
the feeling of good or bad; so also is this world. It is perfect.
By perfection is meant that it is perfectly fitted to meet its
ends. We may all be perfectly sure that it will go on beautifully
well without us, and we need not bother our heads wishing to help
it.
Yet we must do good; the desire to do good is the highest motive
power we have, if we know all the time that it is a privilege to
help others. […]
[And] one must first know how to work without attachment, then
one will not be a fanatic. When we know that this world is like a
dog's curly tail and will never get straightened, we shall not
become fanatics. If there were no fanaticism in the world, it
would make much more progress than it does now. It is a mistake to
think that fanaticism can make for the progress of mankind. On the
contrary, it is a retarding element creating hatred and anger, and
causing people to fight each other, and making them unsympathetic.
We think that whatever we do or possess is the best in the world,
and what we do not do or possess is of no value. So, always
remember the instance of the curly tail of the dog whenever you
have a tendency to become a fanatic. You need not worry or make
yourself sleepless about the world; it will go on without you.
When you have avoided fanaticism, then alone will you work well.
It is the level-headed man, the calm man, of good judgment and
cool nerves, of great sympathy and love, who does good work and so
does good to himself.
--Swami Vivekananda, From "The Complete Works of Swami
Vivekananda."
Student completes PhD after
50 years
Press release issued: 14 February 2023
A student who started a PhD in 1970 has
finally graduated today.
Dr Nick Axten, now 76, said he needed “a long
hard think” over the more than 50 intervening years.
In 1970 Dr Axten received a prestigious Fulbright scholarship for
a PhD in mathematical sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.
But after five years he returned to the UK with the PhD
unfinished.
Today the University of Bristol conferred him a Doctor of
Philosophy in front of his wife Claire Axten and 11-year-old
granddaughter Freya.
Dr Axten said: “What I was trying to do in the early 70s was
exceptionally difficult.
“Some problems are so great it takes the best part of a lifetime
to get your head around them. They need a long hard think. This
one has taken me 50 years."
Dr Axten’s research, which he hopes to publish, builds on the
ideas he was working on in America five decades ago. It is a new
theory for understanding human behavior based on the values each
person holds. Dr Axten says it has the potential to change our
view of behavioral psychology.
When he started his undergraduate in Leeds in 1967, men wore their
hair long and women were wearing miniskirts.
Smoking inside university buildings was the norm and personal
computers were still sci-fi.
“It was still flower power and there was a revolutionary feel. It
was the time of the Vietnam War, Paris, Prague and student
sit-ins. Jack Straw was president of the students’ union in
Leeds,” he remembered. “Sociology and psychology were suddenly
boom subjects. I went to study them because I wanted to understand
people.
“I have loved being a student again at Bristol University. All of
the other philosophy graduate students were around 23 but they
accepted me as one of their own. They are clever people full of
ideas and I loved talking with them – especially at the pub in the
afternoon.
“Doing a PhD is a lot of hard work, but it’s been brilliant.”
Dr Axten came to the University Bristol in 2016 to do an MA in
Philosophy, aged 69. He then studied for a PhD in Philosophy at
the same university, finishing in 2022 aged 75.
His University of Bristol supervisor, Professor Samir Okasha,
said: “Nick was an incredibly enthusiastic, energetic and
committed student during his time here.
“It’s fantastic to see him graduate half a century after he
started his original PhD.”
During a varied career Dr Axten lived all over the UK and was
creator and principal author of the school teaching programme
‘Oxford Primary Science’.
He lives in Wells, Somerset, with his wife and is father of two
children and four grandchildren.
Dr Nick Axten in the early 1970s and on the day of his
graduation.
A picture of the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of
Learning, taken in the early '70s.
(Image credit: Dr Nick Axten)
Dr Nick Axten outside the Wills Memorial Building.
Original article:
http://bristol.ac.uk/news/2023/february/phd-after-50-years.html
Solving grammar’s greatest puzzle
How a determined student made Sanskrit’s ‘language machine’ work
for the first time in 2,500 years
By Tom Almeroth-Williams
A grammatical problem which has defeated Sanskrit scholars since
the 5th Century BC has finally been solved by an Indian PhD
student at the University of Cambridge.
Rishi Rajpopat (St John's College) made the breakthrough by decoding
a rule taught by “the father of linguistics” Pāṇini.
The discovery makes it possible to 'derive' any Sanskrit word – to
construct millions of grammatically correct words including ‘mantra’
and ‘guru’ – using Pāṇini’s revered ‘language machine’ which is
widely considered to be one of the greatest intellectual
achievements in history.
Leading Sanskrit experts have described Rajpopat’s discovery as
‘revolutionary’ and it could now mean that Pāṇini’s grammar can be
taught to computers for the first time.
While researching for his PhD thesis, published on 15th December
2022, Dr Rajpopat decoded a 2,500 year old algorithm which makes it
possible, for the first time, to accurately use Pāṇini’s ‘language
machine’.
Pāṇini’s system – 4,000 rules detailed in his renowned work, the
Aṣṭādhyāyī, which is thought to have been written around 500BC – is
meant to work like a machine. Feed in the base and suffix of a word
and it should turn them into grammatically correct words and
sentences through a step-by-step process.
Until now, however, there has been a big problem. Often, two
or more of Pāṇini’s rules are simultaneously applicable at the same
step leaving scholars to agonise over which one to choose.
Solving so-called 'rule conflicts', which affect millions of
Sanskrit words including certain forms of ‘mantra’ and ‘guru’,
requires an algorithm.
Pāṇini taught a metarule – termed by Rajpopat ‘1.4.2 vipratiṣedhe
paraṁ kāryam’ – to help us decide which rule should be applied in
the event of ‘rule conflict’ but for the last 2,500 years,
scholars have misinterpreted this metarule meaning that they often
ended up with a grammatically incorrect result.
In an attempt to fix this issue, many scholars laboriously developed
hundreds of other metarules but Dr Rajpopat shows that these are not
just incapable of solving the problem at hand – they all produced
too many exceptions – but also completely unnecessary. Rajpopat
shows that Pāṇini’s ‘language machine’ is ‘self-sufficient’.
“Pāṇini had an extraordinary mind and he built a machine
unrivalled in human history. He didn’t expect us to add new ideas
to his rules. The more we fiddle with Pāṇini's grammar, the more
it eludes us.”
― Rishi Rajpopat
Traditionally, scholars have interpreted Pāṇini’s metarule as
meaning:
In the event of a conflict between two
rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the
grammar’s serial order wins.
Rajpopat rejects this, arguing instead that Pāṇini meant that
between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word
respectively, Pāṇini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to
the right side.
Employing this interpretation, Rajpopat found Pāṇini’s language
machine produced grammatically correct words with almost no
exceptions.
Take ‘mantra’ and ‘guru’ as examples.
In the sentence 'devāḥ prasannāḥ mantraiḥ' ('The Gods [devāḥ]
are pleased [prasannāḥ] by the mantras [mantraiḥ]') we encounter
‘rule conflict’ when deriving mantraiḥ ‘by the mantras’.
The derivation starts with ‘mantra + bhis’. One rule is
applicable to left part 'mantra' and the other to right part
'bhis'. We must pick the rule applicable to the right part ‘bhis’,
which gives us the correct form ‘mantraiḥ’.
And in the the sentence 'jñānaṁ dīyate guruṇā' ('Knowledge
[jñānaṁ] is given [dīyate] by the guru [guruṇā]') we encounter
rule conflict when deriving guruṇā 'by the guru'.
The derivation starts with ‘guru + ā’. One rule is
applicable to left part 'guru' and the other to right part
'ā'.
We must pick the rule applicable to the right part ‘ā’,
which gives us the correct form ‘guruṇā’.
Eureka moment
As Rajpopat struggled to make progress, his supervisor at Cambridge,
Professor Vincenzo Vergiani, Professor of Sanskrit, gave him some
prescient advice: “If the solution is complicated, you are probably
wrong.”
“Six months later, I had a eureka moment,” Rajpopat says. “I was
almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So I closed the books
for a month and just enjoyed the summer, swimming, cycling, cooking,
praying and meditating.
“Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and, within minutes, as I
turned the pages, these patterns starting emerging, and it all
started to make sense.
“At that moment, I thought to myself, in utter astonishment: For
over two millennia, the key to Pāṇini’s grammar was right before
everyone's eyes but hidden from everyone's minds!"
“There was a lot more work to do but I’d found the biggest part of
the puzzle. Over the next few weeks I was so excited, I couldn’t
sleep and would spend hours in the library including in the middle
of the night to check what I’d found and solve related problems.
That work took another two and half years.”
Significance
Sanskrit is an ancient and classical Indo-European language from
South Asia. It is the sacred language of Hinduism, but also the
medium through which much of India’s greatest science, philosophy,
poetry and other secular literature have been communicated for
centuries.
While only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people today,
Sanskrit has growing political significance in India, and has
influenced many other languages and cultures around the world.
“Some of the most ancient wisdom of India has been produced in
Sanskrit and we still don’t fully understand what our ancestors
achieved.” Rishi Rajpopat
“We’ve often been led to believe that we’re not important, that we
haven’t brought enough to the table. I hope this discovery will
infuse students in India with confidence, pride, and hope that they
too can achieve great things.”
Vincenzo Vergiani, Professor of Sanskrit at the University of
Cambridge, says:
"My student Rishi has cracked it – he has found an extraordinarily
elegant solution to a problem which has perplexed scholars for
centuries. This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit
at a time when interest in the language is on the rise.”
A major implication of Dr Rajpopat’s discovery is that now we have
the algorithm that runs Pāṇini's grammar, we could potentially teach
this grammar to computers.
"Computer scientists working on Natural Language Processing gave up
on rule-based approaches over 50 years ago", Rajpopat says.
“So teaching computers how to combine the speaker’s intention with
Pāṇini’s rule-based grammar to produce human speech would be a major
milestone in the history of human interaction with machines, as well
as in India's intellectual history."
* * *
Pāṇini is thought to have lived in a region in what is now
north-west Pakistan and south-east Afghanistan.
Rishi Rajpopat was born in a suburb of Mumbai in 1995.
Rajpopat learnt Sanskrit in high school and Pāṇini's Sanskrit
grammar informally from a retired Indian professor at no charge
whilst pursuing his Bachelors in Economics in Mumbai.
Following a Masters at Oxford, for which he raised money by writing
to hundreds of potential donors, Rajpopat started his PhD at St
John’s College and Cambridge’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies in 2017 on a full scholarship funded by the Cambridge Trust
and the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. He was awarded his doctorate in
January 2022. He recently joined the School of Divinity at the
University of St Andrews.
Cambridge has a long history of studying Sanskrit, and Cambridge
University Library holds a significant collection of Sanskrit
manuscripts.
Video: here.
Article:
https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/solving-grammars-greatest-puzzle
Rishi Rajpopat cracked Panini’s puzzle but
not many cheering his ‘miraculous’ work
Rishi Rajpopat recalled the process behind
his gruelling research. It involved a month-long break, cooking,
swimming, and praying.
ZOYA BHATTI 30 January, 2023 09:50 am IST
[...]
Unearthing the process
Rajpopat recalled the process behind his gruelling research, delving
deep into all that helped him crack the code.
“So, I took a month-long break [before my research] during which I
had nothing to do with Panini. I was cooking, swimming, cycling
around, meditating, and praying, because there comes a time when you
ask god for little things here and there, like this book and this
laptop. Other times you ask for bigger things, like save my PhD,” he
quipped, adding that it was only after he begrudgingly returned from
this break that he noticed this: When two rules apply to two
different items—one to the root and the other to the suffix—the rule
applicable to the suffix, i.e. to the right-hand side, wins.
“Panini’s Ashtadhyayi is not the kind of book you purchase when
teaching yourself a second language as an adult. You dive into it
knowing Sanskrit, and that’s the beauty of it. It is the creative
enterprise of a genius, of a very serious theoretical linguist who
set out to achieve something extraordinary, and that achievement
remains unparalleled to this day,” added Rajpopat, in tribute to the
subject of his research.
Read full article:
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/college-student-solves-revolutionary-2500-year-old-language-puzzle
College student solves ‘revolutionary’
2,500-year-old language puzzle
By Stephanie Weaver | Published December 28,
2022
[…]
Rajpopat concluded, "I can confirm, from my own experiences, that
dogged determination and faith are a brilliant combination, and
together, they can do wonders for all human beings. I am not
special; if I can achieve my goals, everyone else also most
certainly can."
Full article:
https://www.fox10phoenix.com/news/college-student-solves-revolutionary-2500-year-old-language-puzzle
My warmest regards to
Fr. Arsene Annasse
