Special Lectures

Public lectures play a very important role in bringing science to the masses. The tradition was started at the Royal Institution in Britain when Michael Faraday organized lectures for the general public. The typical lecture highlighted some particular aspect of science and to emphasize the fact that scientific claims need to be verified by experiments, Faraday's lectures usually contained experimental demonstrations. That tradition still continues after a century and half. Indeed, the large crowds at these lectures caused a traffic jam of hansom cabs so much so that the Albemarle Street on which the Royal Institution stands had to be declared a one-way street. In fact it is claimed that this was the first one way street in the world.
                           Taking leaf out of Faraday's work, it is not surprising if the mathematical year encourages public lectures on mathematics...lectures which would inspire confidence amongst the typical citizen that mathematics may, after all, have something interesting for him or her. In fact, I feel that the Indian institutions are slow in catching on to this opportunity. There are not many public lectures in maths to attract the typical member of the public.
                          At the other end, there are several technical lectures and workshops which encourages the graduates and research workers to look at the emerging areas in mathematics. One such example was of the Mathematical Panorama Lectures organized by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. To capture the seriousness of these lectures, one may note that those wishing to attend these were encouraged to attend a workshop at IIT, Mumbai where preparatory lectures on the topic of the Panorama lectures were given. The topic of the Panorama Lectures was The Dynamics of Vector Fields in Dimension 3. The topic would interest only a small community of research workers; yet the efforts spent on it was well worth it.