Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1, previous blog post)

Such caricatures of Chicago not only date back to the days of Clarence Darrow or the days of Al Capone as the media would gladly recall, ⁶³ but had their academic versions, and in the field of mathematics, as well. The 1998 book “A Beautiful Mind” by The New York Times correspondent Sylvia Nasar about the mysterious but often sad life stories of the mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., told of the tremendous interest on the part of the University of Chicago’s mathematics department including the mathematician Shiing-shen Chern, a patriarch figure in mathematics, ⁶⁴ toward an up-and-coming, flamboyant but abrasive John Nash in 1958-1959, who at the time was on the faculty of MIT but was fancying himself as the “the prince of peace”, the leader of a great movement for world peace, and “the left foot of God”; ⁶⁵ when Prof. Adrian Albert of the University of Chicago made an offer of a “prestigious chair” to John Nash, Nash responded that he had to decline because he was “scheduled to become Emperor of Antarctica”. ⁶⁶ Such undiplomatic response and related uttering prompted then MIT president Julius Stratton to call John Nash “a very sick man”. ⁶⁷ Nash, however, confidently told others that he was receiving encrypted, important political “messages” communicating to him through The New York Times. ⁶⁸

So in early 1959 the very promising mathematician John Nash chose not to go to Chicago, staying at MIT in Boston and talking out loud about forming a world peace movement, but soon (on or around April 8, 1959), he was involuntarily sent to McLean Hospital, committed and diagnosed as suffering from ‘paranoid schizophrenia’. ⁶⁹ This sad story has been dramatized somewhat differently in the Ron Howard movie adaptation of “A Beautiful mind”, with Nash portrayed by actor Russell Crowe, in which Nash was fancying himself as having been invited to work for a shadowy, secretive agency that was probably part of the Pentagon, analyzing data related to national security. ⁷⁰ In the real-world story according to Sylvia Nasar’s book, Nash’s claim was that he received messages through The New York Times, and although years before his world-peace ideas Nash had done some consulting work for the military and political think-tank the RAND Corporation, his association with RAND ended at the height of the McCarthy era in 1954 when he was napped by the police for engaging in homosexual activity. ⁷¹

John Nash nevertheless did not really believe that he had a mental illness. Looking back at his life in his 1994 Nobel Prize autobiography, Nash blamed it on the “characteristic of my orientation”, stating that “rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos”, and referring to the “madness” of Zarathustra and his millions of “naïve followers” as a case in point. ⁷²

But was John Nash a threat to the society in any violent sense during his “madness” – which would have been what mattered most to others – to justify confining a genius like him to the psychiatric ward? During his ‘self-styled’ world peace campaign in 1958-1959 he wrote many letters to family, colleagues and friends, and to the FBI, foreign ambassadors, the pope, and the United Nations, some of which presumably to do with his thought of (or allegation of) involvement in a “conspiracy” among military leaders to take over the world, ⁷³ but he did not actually lay a hand on even his wife, Alicia Larde, during those difficult times, and his family’s primary concern was that he might be treated like a “common criminal” if he was not taken as “insane”; the technical reason for his psychiatric committal was safety for Nash’s wife, but Alicia Larde also felt that by doing so she betrayed Nash’s determination to pursue his goals. ^{74, 75}

There, however, may have existed real concerns about John Nash among part of the authorities, though the author on the John Nash life story did not make an explicit connection in her book: all of John Nash’s ramblings of world peace and talks of military conspiracy were except an old incident that could have been of concern to the security-minded: when he was only a teenager in his hometown of Bluefield, West Virginia, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when the older Americans had gone off to fight in the Second World War, Nash and his teenage friends Donald Reynolds and Herman Kirchner were fooling around with homemade pipe-bomb experiments in Kirchner’s basement, before Kirchner died in an accidental explosion in 1944. ⁷⁶

Now there could indeed be something there in 1959, meaning that the talented young mathematician might have in fact been capable of figuring out some crucial politics ahead of time – his credibility bolstered by his prior background of doing research at RAND. One can look at it this way: in January 1959 Fidel Castro’s revolution was winning in Cuba, an island just a stone’s throw across the water from the United States, and North Vietnamese communists were also adopting a path of “armed struggle” to unify with the South against the backdrop of increasing U.S. military assistance to South Vietnam; ^{77, 78} it was not like signs of warning did not exist for the turbulent decade ahead, ⁷⁹ and ten years later by 1969 when the Vietnam War was in full force and the St. Stephen’s Day-born American leftist William Ayers was founding the militant-resistance organization Weather Underground to engage in a series of high-profile, violent bombings in the United States for radical causes, ⁸⁰ John Nash’s thoughts by then could have been viewed as a borderline, nonviolent precursor to these later actions of Ayers and his associates; but by then Nash’s expressions had already been concluded as thoughts of “madness” by some (but not all) psychiatrists, and by the authorities. ⁸¹

What else would be a better explanation than the above – beside Nash’s own brash behavior and his habit of convoluted language – that a mathematician of original thinking and prolific production ⁸² who has now been recognized as having made fundamental contributions to the mathematical economic theory, and who has been called “the greatest numerologist the world has ever seen” (i.e., someone better than anyone else at the use of numbers in astrology and other human affairs) by the Princeton mathematician William Browder, ⁸³ was “mentally ill” when it came to his thinking about politics? Recognizing credibility in Nash’s political thoughts is like accepting his mathematical brilliance without automatically overriding any legitimate medical issue there might have been.

(Read Full Article with Footnotes in Feng Gao’s Space) . . .

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Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 1)

It was eleven years before the New Millennium, in February 1989 only several months with my Mathematics Ph.D. degree out of the University of California, Berkeley, when the notion “Mathematics for the New Century” circulating in the mathematics community made a strong impression on me. ¹ A larger public-relations campaign was soon launched by then President George H. W. Bush and the U.S. state governors, spearheaded by a few including Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, for what would become the first National Education Summit held in September 1989 in Charlottesville, Virginia, where it was declared that, among other objectives, U.S. high school students would be leading the world in mathematics and science by the year 2000. ² Subsequent efforts would lead to the Goals 2000 project later signed into law in 1994 as a centerpiece of President Bill Clinton’s education reform. ³

In 1989 I was a computer science faculty member at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, as an educator and researcher generally interested in good news for education and particularly impressed by declaration of lofty goals and projects to achieve them. Education, however, was often trumped by other more ominous or more urgent matters, such as the Gulf War in 1991; or at least that was what I would presume. But press archives indicate that on January 17, 1991, the day of the launch of Operation Desert Storm, or what Iraqi president Saddam Hussein called “Mother of all Battles”, ⁴ President Bush, Sr. actually met with his education advisory panel to hear about creating national standards for student performance, though he made no commitments on their proposal at the time according to panel member and former U.S. secretary of labor William Brock. ⁵

Having grown up a peaceful child and done Ph.D. study under someone who happened to have a past background of vigorous opposition to the Vietnam War, I tended to look into things via more idealistic, less bombastic lenses, and my presumption could sometimes be quite naïve. The peaceful and beautiful British Columbia where I had moved to in 1988 was not all reclusive when it came to U.S. politics: the city of Nelson, B.C. was well-known as a haven for many of the Vietnam-era “draft dodgers”, ⁶ and U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Catherine Glaspie, who was in the news over the controversy of exactly what the U.S. government told Saddam Hussein in July 1990 just days before his launching invasion of Kuwait, was originally from Vancouver. ⁷

By the time Bill Clinton became U.S. president and right away came to Vancouver for his first major international summit, the first Clinton-Yeltsin summit in April 1993, pitching different themes from the previous Bush administration’s, including the re-emergence of Richard Nixon as an elder statesman on U.S. foreign policy, ⁸ I was already out of the academia and bogged down in some politics of my focus, and was viewing the pomp and circumstance of the glitzy visit by the rare, distinguished guests to a place I had not long before been exiled from – part of the summit was held at the University of British Columbia – as a sort of ‘swan song’ by the departing Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, hardly noticing that at the time President Clinton was also transmitting his message to the U.S. Congress to legislate for Goals 2000, Educate America Act. ⁹

President Clinton loves Vancouver, British Columbia, obviously.

When the new century, or rather the New Millennium as it was referred to by then, finally drew close the views on progress towards it were by no means universal. Some in fact were quite critical about perceived lack of progress in education despite the efforts: at the eve of the New Millennium, then The New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein described the movement toward “Goals 2000” as a failure’s shutout victory over the United States. ¹⁰

Just before the New Millennium began I was joining the Silicon Valley in California (after another stint as an educator at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu), arriving at the high-tech world among the dot-com and venture-capitalism rushes, which I wasn’t really part of. The ominous notion someone like me read and heard daily about the New Millennium at the time was not failure of education, but fears for Y2K (also called the ‘millennium bug’), and the tremendous amount of government and corporate efforts being made (and of course money being spent) to prevent disasters from materializing out of tiny numerical ‘legacies’ of computer programs. It was reported that one man in Ontario, Canada, had been preparing for the potential doomsday scenario for 20 years, burying 42 school buses deep underground as a home for himself. ¹¹

Fortunately, when the New Year of 2000 finally came nothing of a catastrophic type happened, though among the worldwide euphoria of New Millennium celebrations one wondered if there might not be a few vampires arriving for the occasion and taking away with them some tormented souls. The U.S. government later reported only a number of small technical glitches at the moment of the arrival of the millennium, such as: on the Naval Observatory web page the date read “19100”, the alarm systems at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Boston malfunctioned, a federal facility security access system in Nebraska was stuck in the open position, a Federal Aviation Administration system stopped processing some notices to airmen, an automatic backup system at the Cleveland Air Route Traffic Control Center failed to activate, a fire alarm system at a Financial Management Service office in Kansas was falsely activated, also in Kansas a lock failed at a Food and Drug Administration leased facility, and a Chicago-area bank stopped electronic transfers of Medicare payments to healthcare providers; in the end only oddly behaving malfunctions like the above, without any obvious disaster, yet all the while in Guam the processing of federal food-stamp benefits was being carried out manually because the systems there were not Y2K-compliant. ¹²

At the Eve of New Year 2000, I myself was in a hotel in Hong Kong, having arrived in Hong Kong the morning of December 31, 1999, but prevented by unexpected shortage of bus seats from being able to get to Guangzhou (Canton) in mainland China, only 108 miles north, to be with my parents to welcome the new age at midnight. While lights were glittering in Hong Kong, it wasn’t so much in the hotel I was staying but there was a good-spirited celebration for the New Year countdown. I wondered at the time what it might be like at the moment of the New Year across the Chinese mainland border: the city directly across from Hong Kong was Shenzhen, the special economic zone where Chinese market-oriented economic reforms first began in 1979-80 which have transformed the country from reliance on Communist ideology to functioning as one of the main engines of the modern world economy; one of Shenzhen’s most thriving industries has been – you may not believe it – book printing for the rest of the world. ¹³

When the New Millennium began, I and others didn’t know that in a couple of years, in 2002, a young American man by the name of Mark Ndesandjo, originally from Kenya, would move to Shenzhen and make his life there as a businessman and piano performer, and that – something many people today still don’t know – this young man is half brother of 2008 U.S. President Elect Barack Obama. ¹⁴ Honestly, at the night of the New Year’s Eve on December 31, 1999, I found it more interesting that the hotel owner’s daughter emceeing the countdown celebration in the hotel lobby looked like a certain student girl I had come across frequently on UC Berkeley campus during the 1980s.

Now with nine years, nearly a decade, or almost one-tenth of one-tenth of the New Millennium, gone, I am finally posting my first weblog (i.e., online diary), on a day that is special to me not only in a small annual sense but in a big way. I feel like I am finally leaving the gallows (behind), but still with chains in tow. Not the worst manner in which to transit into a new era, perhaps.

So where have I been in the nine years, to think of myself as entering the New Millennium only now?

(Read Full Article with Footnotes in Feng Gao’s Space) . . .

Or

(Go to Part 2, next blog post)

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