Closing down and summarizing the Raju Affair
With regard to Raju’s “closet-racists” at UCT (whom I call the “Silenced
majority”), some are just too frightened by Fallist thugs (like the perennially
pardoned/registered Chumani Maxwele) to attempt to engage in public
debate. Others, are emeritus senior
scientists or in-house funded younger researchers who fear that the UCT
Executive will take away their privileges if they speak up. Others still, are
senior professors with enough funds to ‘weather’ the Fallist storm until they
reach retirement age. But, sadly, many buy
the Fallists’ false accusations that they are guilty racists, simply because
they are ‘white’. The older ones didn’t
do enough to resist Apartheid while institutionally-racist UCT was “colluding”
with Verwoerd/Vorster/Botha. The younger
ones, by hook or crook, still bask in pro-‘white-biased bounty from the
government, UCT itself and the “white-monopoly” private sector while they
humiliate ‘black’ students and deny ‘black’ academics ad hominem promotion.
Tragically,
these colour-coded criminals, like Raju, either avoid reading well-documented
history [e.g. mine for UCT - Was/Is the University of Cape Town (UCT) an institutionally
colonialist/sexist/racist institution?
Parts 1 & 2 on my Blog Site – timguineacrowe.blogspot.co.za] or just
change it to suit whatever power-based ”contextual” desire currently
prevails. The ‘truth’ (a dirty word at
today’s embattled UCT) is that the old guys and gals resisted Apartheid
peacefully, colluded with no one, and developed UCT into a world-class
university capable of generating real “critical” thinkers and daring ‘do-ers’
needed to resuscitate South Africa, indeed the continent. [On the downside, during the 1980s, they did
evade educating poorly prepared ‘black’ students, leaving that to the
failed/still-failing Academic Support/Development Programmes.]
Under the Saunders/Ramphele ‘hegemonies’, major adaptive institutional
and curriculum-related change took place and racist acts were dealt with
decisively and severely. An excellent
example of curriculum development is the decolonized, Afrocentric,
affirmative-action M.Sc. Programme in Conservation
Biology run by
the FitzPatrick Institute within the Department of Biological Sciences.
Also
during that period, the Faculties of Science, Health Science, Engineering and
Commerce introduced and developed transparent and fair policies for ad hominem promotion that are applied
equitably today. That fact was confirmed
at a well-attended meeting on 24 June 2017 by Director of the Next Generation
Professoriate Programme, eminent educationalist Prof. Robert Morrell. But, because of objections raised by pro-Fallists
(especially members of UCT’s new, racialist, secret society, the Black Academic
Caucus), Rob’s conclusions have been kept secret by the UCT Executive.
Raju is right when he states that decolonisation is about “critical
rejection”. But, his and Fallists’ “critical” stems not from rational debate, but
from critical race theory that seeks
power, regardless of the cost, for the self-identified oppressed rather than
academic credibility.
With regard to Raju’s question: “Is there a single salient point of mine
anyone could argue against?”, Henri Laurie and Jeff Murugan did just that
extensively, pretty much politely, at his seminar and in subsequent
e-mails. Indeed, all of UCT’s
mathematical scientists, including two DVCs, refuse to endorse Raju’s
ganita/zeroism alternative as a preferable way to do or teach mathematics. I am informed by several of them that it has
no academic foothold even in India.
Where are Raju’s great ganita-based research publications and who are
his intellectual academic ‘offspring’ that might form a School of Ganita
Mathematics anywhere on Earth, especially in the Third World?
What respectable mathematic historians endorse his two most conclusions:
1.
there
was no Euclid or Euclideans 300 years BCE and that Hypatia, a black woman,
compiled The (‘proof-free’) Elements during the 4th c. CE
and was raped and hanged; and
2.
Newton
and Leibniz’s development of the calculus is little more than ganita hijacked
in India by Jesuits and garnished in Europe with Christian metaphysics.
With regard to Euclid and The
Elements, very little is known about the author(s), beyond the
widely accepted conclusion (disputed by Raju) that she/he/they lived in
Alexandria around 300 BCE. The Elements is a compilation of
theorems probably not developed/discovered by ‘Euclid’. They were the work of earlier mathematicians
(mainly Greeks): e.g. Pythagoras (and his school), Hippocrates of Chios,
Theaetetus of Athens, and Eudoxus of Cnidos.
In The Elements,
‘Euclid’ arranged theorems in a logical manner (albeit not with the rigour of
modern formal mathematics) so that they follow from simple axioms. The Elements is also credited
with devising particularly ingenious proofs of previously discovered theorems:
e.g., Theorem 48 in Book 1.
Hypatia,
in all non-Raju references, is depicted as ‘white’ and described as the
daughter of Theon, a Greek mathematician from whom she learned and developed
mathematics. Her major interests appear
to have been in astronomy and Platonic philosophy. Because she was an influential pagan who
challenged the status quo, she was kidnapped by a mob of Christian monks
who stripped and tortured her by scraping her skin off with tiles or oyster
shells. Then they dragged her through the
streets until she died, ripped off her limbs and burned her. Raju’s only
‘evidence’ that Hypatia was ‘black’ is that she may have been born in Egypt.
With
regard to Newton, Leibniz and calculus, they ‘concocted’ it in parallel using
markedly different strategies and notation.
If anyone hijacked it, it was Leibniz who benefitted from examination of
Newton’s notes. To say the least, they
disliked and disparaged one another.
Indeed, the history of “Western” science is replete with similar
less-than-professional behaviour. For an
excellent example of this, read David Hull’s Science as a Process that chronicles the ‘systematics wars’ that
plagued evolutionary biology during the last four decades of the 20th
Century.
To answer Raju’s question: “Did you or anyone else in UCT produce an
iota of evidence or arguments against those statements? “, follow his advice
and “just examine all the videos and also all the emails”. Better still, go to UCT magnificent
libraries and do your own research. As
film character ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan says: “Opinions are like assholes; everyone
has got one”.
Raju concludes that: “The whole world is laughing at the closet racists,
[charlatans, KKK types] of UCT who only understand medieval witch hunting
tactics and the mob fascist tactics.”
Just who are “these people” that are the object of Raju’s, pro-Fallist
(indeed the “whole world’s”) sniggering and smearing.
George earned his B.Sc. and Honours
degrees at UCT and is a senior scholar and emeritus distinguished professor of
complex systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics. Although he has conducted ground-breaking,
internationally acclaimed research on gravity and cosmology, he also
has explored the essence of complexity and causation, especially how it relates
to the brain and human behaviour. One might get some total sense of his work by
reading On The Moral Nature of the
universe: Cosmology, Theology, and Ethics,
which has been translated into Russian and Chinese.
Ellis earned a PhD in Applied Mathematics at the University
of Cambridge exploring inhomogeneous and
anisotropic cosmologies and singularities and continued and expanded his
research along these lines. This culminated in his co-authoring (with
Stephen Hawking) The
Large Scale Structure of Space-Time in
1973, now regarded (except by Raju) as a classic.
He is a founding member of the Academy of Science of South
Africa, participated in the commission that recommended the construction of the
Southern African Large Telescope, and served as a member of the task group
responsible for drafting SA's Green Paper on Science and Technology.
He has published more than 500 (peer-reviewed – not opinion
pieces) articles in the world’s top scientific journals (Nature, Physical
Review and the Astrophysical Journal) and
authored/co-authored 12 books and many more book chapters. This led to his serving on the editorial
boards of leading journals (Classical and Quantum Gravity and
the Monthly Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society) and as editor-in-chief of General
Relativity and Gravitation.
Locally, in 1984, Ellis was one of the few researchers
awarded an A-rating by the National Research Foundation when it initiated its
rating scheme. He is one of a less than handful of researchers that has
retained an A-rating since then.
He is a Fellow and Past President of the Royal
Society of South Africa (RSSA), Founder
Member and past Member of Council of Academy of Science of South
Africa (ASSAf), Fellow of the Third World Academy of Science (TWAS), Past President of the International Society for General Relativity and Gravitation and Fellow of the University of Cape Town. He earned more medals than were displayed on
Idi Amin’s uniform, including the Star of South Africa Medal presented by President Nelson Mandela (1999), the Templeton Prize (presented in 2004
by Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace) and Order of Mapungubwe (Silver) conferred
by President Thabo Mbeki (2006).
In recognition of his achievements as a formal
mathematician, he was invited to speak at the Turing Centenary Conference in
Manchester in June 2012.
His
education/developmental publications include:
Outside of academia, George is chairperson of Quaker Service (Cape), and serves on the board
of the Association for Educational Transformation (ASSET). ELRU, Philani, Nalibali, and The
Little Hands Trust are other inspiring local organisations (I was on
the Boards of ELRU and Philani for many years). I am an avid fan and supporter
of the Pro Cantu Youth Choir.
Unlike me and most other UCT ‘Ivory Tower’ academics, at the
height of Apartheid he would drive to the townships with his students to the aid of people
assaulted by apartheid police officers, and hide black activists in his home to
protect them from the police during the state of emergency. He used a substantial amount of his R10
million Templeton Prize money to establish a scholarship fund to pay for
talented young black students who couldn't afford to take up their offered
places at UCT.
Jeff Murugan
Also a UCT grad, although he never
‘self-identifies’, associate prof. Jeff is a ‘black’ South African of Indian descent who was able to come to study at UCT because his
parents initially ‘invested’ in him beyond their means. Thereafter, he earned scholarships on
academic merit. More than anyone I know,
he understands fully the horrendous effects of Apartheid.
Raju
is correct when he ‘brands’ Jeff as one of George’s many prominent academic
‘offspring’. But, Jeff is not an Ellis
‘clone’. They have disagreed more about everything
from black holes to the neuro-physics of the human brain than they have agreed,
and even wrote a book about their arguments.
Although he asked me not to, I’ll quote one statement from his
devastating critique of Raju: “From him [Ellis, not Raju] I learnt two things:
always be curious and never compromise on your principles.”
With regard to academic achievements,
Jeff is currently, deputy head of department, president of the South African
Gravity Society, a founding member of the South African Young Academy of
Science, an Associate of the American Museum of Natural History (like me!),
Vice-President of the BRICS Association of Gravity and Cosmology and a former
member of the Institute for Advanced Study, the single most prestigious
institution for theoretical research in the world. He has graduated 4 PhD
students at UCT, two of whom are female and two of whom are black. All have the most significant letters (other
than B.Sc. and Ph.D.) after their names: JOB.
They have successfully competed for either faculty positions (University
of Surrey, University of Khartoum and the Ecole Normal in Mauritius) or
postdoctoral positions (WITS).
In 2020, his research group here at UCT
will host the Strings 2020 annual conference, the single most prestigious
meeting in his primary field of research.
Raju’s son was one of the organisers for the 2015 meeting held in India. This is the first time it will be held in
Africa, or for that matter the Southern Hemisphere.
Henri Laurie
I’ve known Henri for decades.
He is a coal-face educator who brilliantly taught my daughter
mathematics she uses today in her job – salaried far beyond that of a UCT
professor. Henri’s main interest is
using mathematics to sharpen debates in plant ecology. To that end, he has
worked on pattern analysis, the effect of size distribution, lottery models for
Cape fynbos, heuweltjies, projective geometry for human motion and spatial
dynamics. As his e-mails above indicate,
he emphasizes the meaning of mathematical statements, and he cultivates
enthusiasm for mathematics as a meaningful and therefore useful activity. With regard to me and my laughable life, have a look at the following pieces (and others) in my Blog Site (timguineacrowe.blogspot.co.za).
My (and my spouse’s) ‘white’ privilege
Races within modern humans are artificial, nefarious, perverse constructs
I close with questions to Raju and those who spent thousands of UCT’s
limited Rands in promoting his ‘efforts’ to decolonize her.
Who’s honest and who’s laughing at whom? To Max – is there any hope of your at least
admonishing Raju for his latest defamation of the mathematicians? Or, are they going to join me in being “left
behind”?
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