Durwasa Chakraborty

A couple of weeks ago I travelled to Bangalore for a hackathon at the Indian Institute of Science, organised by Prof. Siddharth Gadgilhttps://math.iisc.ac.in/~gadgil/ and Emergence AI. The structure of the hackathon was: spend the first couple of days getting taught Lean4https://lean-lang.org/ by Prof. Siddharth Gadgil and Prof. Prathamesh T. V. H.https://krea.edu.in/sias/dr-t-v-h-prathamesh/ , then disappear into a cave for a weekhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SARbwvhupQ and emerge with a project. The judges were Anand Rao Tadipatrihttps://dl.acm.org/profile/99661086046 and Sidharth Bhathttps://grosser.science/team/bhat/ ; both PhD students in mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

There’s a question I get asked often enough that I’ve started collecting answers for it: why do you shoot everything in black and white?

“Call me Ishmael.” That line opens one of literature’s great sweeping saga: a man, a whale, and the bruising, salt-earning adventure of simply not dying at sea. But the name does something subtle: like a polite knock on the front door of literature. It positions the narrator. In Sanskrit, nāma means exactly that: the thing by which you call someone from afar.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” Voltaire (and also every Spider-Man movie ever) There’s this video of Chad Smith, the drummer from Red Hot Chili Peppers. He’s hearing a song for the first time, no prep, no notes, no second take. And yet somehow, he just gets it. He catches the groove like it’s muscle memory, then makes the whole thing sound better.That’s the magic of practice. Not the kind where you count hours, but the kind where you repeat something so many times it becomes your second nature, your reflex. Whether it’s drumming, coding, or explaining your PhD topic to your relatives without crying, the idea’s the same: do it till it’s boring, and then keep doing it till it’s beautiful.

“Data races are bad.” — Every systems programming course, ever. But why are they bad? And what exactly are they? Let’s be a little Aristotelian about this—question everything. So here we go:

Recently, The Hindu published an article that raised a pertinent question regarding the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF): “Is quantity trumping quality?” As I write from the hallowed halls of one of India’s premier institutions—the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras—I find myself compelled to delve deeper into this issue. Are private institutions genuinely improving, or have they [sic] discovered ways to manipulate research metrics?

Introduction # For someone who has taken a course in Computer Science, they have probably come across a B+ tree, often used in the context of databases for storing data. A B+ tree schematically looks like this:

Preface: Rishi Durvasa, known for his irascible nature, was infamous for his ability to curse. As mythology suggests, Durvasa visited Kanav Rishi’s ashram, and Shakuntala was lost in her daydreams of Dushyant. Furious, Durvasa cursed Shakuntala, saying that the one she dreamed of would forget her when the time came. This is a modern retelling of that ancient story.