A tribute to the Jagadeesans

The Jagadeesans were a husband-and-wife couple who served in the Coimbatore Institute of Technology Math Department. Dr. Jagadeesan taught first year math and Dr.Sarada Jagadeesan taught second year math.

Dr.Jagadeesan

Dr.Jagadeesan was full of energy, and he was relentless in his teaching whether it was the theory, the examples and the homework. He was passionate and would conduct class on Saturday mornings to catch up with the material and the progress he wanted. He also took time to visit us at our hostel and encouraged us to do the best with what we had. He was kind and encouraging. I am not proud to admit that when he came up to me in class and saw me not taking notes, he was surprised and not happy. He asked me that I can do better and owe it to myself to be present and learn. I wish I had listened.

Dr. Sarada Jagadeesan

Dr.Sarada Jagadeesan was a petite woman who would not stand for any nonsense. She was tough but kind and a gentle soul. She was a good teacher and probably one of the few teachers I appreciated. She and Professor of English Joy Raju were good friends and they shared the same offices. Dr. Joy Raju was our first year English teacher and another great teacher as well. She was soft spoken and kind. A couple of incidents about Dr.Sarada Jagadeesan.

Once, she was teaching our class Fourier Transforms and she saw one of the students playing a prank and was annoying the class in general and snickering. She had him stand up. He was little short for his age and she said whenn you were in your diapers, I was getting my Ph.D. in Infinite Series and had him stand down from whatever nonsense he was doing. He stopped.

Another time, I asked her what was the physical meaning of the Laplace or the Fourier Transform and why it was a big deal in Electrical Engineering and she was a little taken aback and then she politely replied that these transforms are just mathematical tools and that I should learn the technique and would find problems that would match the solving techniques in Laplace Transform (time to frequency domain) and so on.

Dr. Radha Jagadeesan

Dr. Sarada Jagadeesan and Dr. Jagadeesan had a son name Radha Jagadeesan who was an IIT entrance exam top ranker, studied at IIT Kanpur and then Cornell and is a professor at Depaul University in Chicago. Dr. Radha won the Alonzo Church award (Alonzo Church was a professor at Princeton and the advisor for Alan Turing).

Jagadeesan, Radha: Software Engineering - School of Computing

Winners of the 2017 Alonzo Church Award – ACM Special Interest Group on Logic and Computation

Dr. Lalita Jagadeesan

She is the wife of Dr. Radha Jagadeesan and she has a BS/Ph.D. from MIT and is a senior strategy leader at Nokia.

Lalita Jagadeesan | Nokia.com

Dr. Ravi Jagadeesan

Dr. Ravi is now a professor of economics at Stanford and got his undergrad and Ph.D. in Math and economics respectively. Dr. Ravi is also a Putnam fellow at Harvard. Putnam fellows have to face a formidable mathematical competition against some of the best in the world.

Ravi Jagadeesan | Department of Economics

Dr. Meena Jagadeesan

Dr. Meena is now a professor at U.Penn in CS. She had her undergrad from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Berkeley in CS.

Meena Jagadeesan 

Dr. Jagadeesan and Dr. Sarada Jagadeesan raised an amazing family which should not be surprising given their intent and their passion for learning. I believe both of them immigrated to the US and Dr. Jagadeesan passed away a few years ago. My friend Rajesh Shanmugavel kept in touch with their family while he lived in the North East. 

Rajesh Shanmugavel also mentioned that Dr.Sarada Jagadeesan has donated her pension for student scholarships for CIT students in need and she lives in Chicago.

Sam Harris on Ayn Rand

Sam Harris vs Ayn Rand 

Sam Harris

Okay, next question, given the popularity of Ayn Rand on the right can you give your best refutation of Objectivism?

Sam Harris

Well, you know, I haven't spent a lot of time reading Rand. I found her novel more or less unreadable and I've read some of her essays. I've read some of her interviews.

My basic issue with her ethics is that she seemed not to understand that pro-social emotions like compassion were a real source of well-being even for quote selfish people.

The stark opposition between selfishness that she thought was rational and altruism that she thought was delusional or masochistic that I think is psychologically untrue and ethically unhelpful.

I think a wisely selfish person more and more begins to recognize that he or she is committed to the happiness of other people and is right to be that their happiness redounds to his own happiness that is a more mature a more enlightened form of ethics than any I've ever heard Rand espouse.

It is also more enlightened and mature than attend to fans of Rand espouse so whatever Rand herself believed those who are drawn to her philosophy often strike me as malignantly selfish and un-illumined by a larger picture of just how good life could become right if we also saw that we were in this together.

Bertrand Russell on Karl Marx

 The video and the transcript.

Bertrand Russell talked about Marx in 1952 interviewed

Interviewer:

Lord Russell, speaking as of today, can you see the influence of any one Philosophers more than any other one?

Bertrand Russell:

Well, I suppose in recent years the most important influence has been Marx. If you can dignify him with the name of philosopher, I should hardly like to dignify him so myself, but I suppose he must count in the list. And he certainly has had more influence than anybody else.

Interviewer:

For those of us who reject Marx, can you offer any positive philosophy to help us toward a more hopeful future?

Bertrand Russell:

Well, less to that. You see, I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing in something or other. And I think all these matters are full of doubt. And the rational man will not be too sure that he's right. I think that we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe in any philosophy. Not even mine. Not even mine.

No, I think we should accept our philosophies with a measure of doubt. What I do think is this that if a philosophy is to bring happiness, it should be inspired by kindly feeling. Now Marx is not inspired by kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proletariat. What he really wanted was the unhappiness of bourgeoise. And it was because of that negative element, because of that hate element that his philosophy produced disaster. A philosophy which is to do good must be one inspired by kindly feeling and not by unkindly feeling.