In a Washington Post op-ed titled, “Court ruling ignores India’s rich heritage of diversity,” UMBC mathematics professor Manil Suri critically examines the Indian Supreme Court’s recent decision to reinstate a 19th-century law criminalizing homosexual acts (Section 377), a law which had been repealed by a lower-court decision in 2009.

In his analysis, Suri draws attention to how the ruling “criticized previous judges for relying too much on foreign precedents in their ‘anxiety to protect the so-called rights of LGBT persons.'”

Suri argues that the foreign imposition in this case is actually the statute itself. He notes: “The statute was passed in 1860 as part of Britain’s colonization of India. Other former British colonies, from Malaysia to Jamaica, have the same law on their books, also labeled Section 377.” He concludes, “India needs to be reminded of its rich heritage of diversity, its historically liberal attitude toward variations in human behavior.”

You can read Suri’s full op-ed here.

Mathematics professor Manil Suri has made quite an impact with a fresh New York Times op-ed ed that re-introduces readers to mathematics through an approach based in the humanities.

In “How to Fall in Love with Math” Suri writes, “Despite what most people suppose, many profound mathematical ideas don’t require advanced skills to appreciate.” One idea that he finds often intrigues people is the origin of numbers.

He writes, “Think of it as a magic trick: harnessing emptiness to create the number zero, then demonstrating how from any whole number, one can create its successor. One from zero, two from one, three from two — a chain reaction of numbers erupting into existence. I still remember when I first experienced this Big Bang of numbers. The walls of my Bombay classroom seemed to blow away, as nascent cardinals streaked through space. Creatio ex nihilo, as compelling as any offered by physics or religion.”

The op-ed received the maximum of 360 comments in its first day online and quickly became the #1 most emailed article of the day. Read the full op-ed on The New York Times website and stay tuned for recaps of Suri’s upcoming radio interviews on the beauty, power and mass appeal of math.

Update: After Suri’s New York Times op-ed appeared in print, he was invited to interviews with Joy Cardin on Wisconsin Public Radio (listen) and Michael Cohen on 1320 WILS radio in Lansing, Michigan (listen). Suri’s Times piece remains the #4 most emailed article of the month.

Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, was recently a guest on the BBC World Service program “The Forum” to discuss “Obsessions, new and old, in literature and technology.”  Joining Suri on the show, which was hosted by Bridget Kendall, were internet analyst and cyber-sceptic Evgeny Morozo and Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marias.

Suri discussed his recent novel, “The City of Devi,” in which the main character is obsessed with bringing a pomegranate to her missing husband.

“She feels that having this symbol almost will somehow lead her to her husband. And in a way it does tell her something about her marriage, but in a very unexpected fashion,” he said.

The guests also spoke about our obsession with technology.  “There’s this belief in technology and computers – these are going to really save us from having to think,” Suri said.

Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, was a guest on the Marc Steiner show on March 14 to discuss his new book “The City of Devi.”

Steiner asked Suri how he reconciles his background in mathematics with the spiritual themes that run through his books, which feature Hindu deities.

“There’s a lot of contrast. On the one hand, I’m very enamored by these ideas from spirituality and almost mysticism,” “But on the other hand, the logical part of me says, ‘hey, wait a minute, that’s not really what’s happening.’”

The full segment can be heard here.

Manil Suri was deep into writing his latest novel, “The City of Devi,” when he realized something alarming: the novel was impossible to finish. The mathematics professor even used a mathematical construct, a possibility tree, to arrive at his conclusion.  He described the process of creating this mathematical “proof” in an essay for “The Daily Beast.”

Of course, Suri did eventually finish the novel, which was published earlier this year. Despite the fact that he disproved his own proof, Suri feels that his mathematical conclusion was a worthwhile endeavor, because it allowed him to reach the insights he needed about the story.

“My possibility tree still communicated something essential: a warning that the story could not be satisfactorily completed under the conditions I was imposing. I had been too beholden to literary orthodoxy, too insistent that the narrative obey the strictures of reality. It was time to loosen these constraints, let the plot freely borrow from whatever genre it pleased: adventure, Bollywood, fantasy,” he writes.

The full piece, “A Mathematically Impossible Novel: Manil Suri Explains ‘The City of Devi’” appeared online on March 15.

Mathematics Professor Manil Suri has been in the news recently, as his latest novel, “The City of Devi,” hits bookstore shelves.

On Wednesday, February 6, the Baltimore City Paper published a review of the book, saying that it “is “streamlined and cinematically purified… by narrowing his focus and heightening the emotional tenor of the city, he manages to give it a mythological quality.”

Suri also spoke with the Baltimore Sun for a February 3 interview entitled “UMBC mathematician Manil Suri publishes his third novel.”  This novel completes a trilogy about hindu dieties that Suri began with his 2001 book, “The Death of Vishnu.”  Speaking of this book, Suri said, “When I first started thinking about the trilogy, I always had an arc in my mind of the past, the present and the future… But my book about the future was an evolution. It took me 12 years to write. Even when I got to the midpoint, I didn’t know if it was going to be about Brahma or about Devi. Every story needs a creator. As the most well-known, Brahma was the most logical face to put there. But when you dig deeper, the true Hindu trinity really is Vishnu, Shiva and Devi, who represent the three different strands of Hinduism. Brahma was a later addition. He came in during the post-Vedic period, when people tried to tie those strands together. Because Devi has nine incarnations, she can be anything: the destroyer, the creator and the symbol of art. But, Brahma’s mythology is such that he doesn’t get activated until you’re at the end of a cycle. If I had been writing a post-apocalyptic novel, he might have been the right person.”

Suri also spoke to NPR’s Weekend Edition, where he talked about how leaving India has affected his writing about the country. “I grew up in like one room of a large apartment, and we were kind of the only Hindu family in an apartment that had three families of Muslims, so you know, that’s why I think the Hindu-Muslim thing keeps coming up in my novels. I don’t think I would have had the space or the quiet to actually concentrate on fiction. I do think that coming here I can sort of see the country much more — much more like a globe, like you would see the moon from the Earth or vice versa. And I think especially with this novel, I can see these relations like, OK, [India is] sitting there next to Pakistan and China, you know, all three of which are armed with nuclear weapons. So that’s one of the advantages,” he said.

Finally, on February 6, Suri spoke with WYPR’s “Maryland Morning” for a segment called “When a Mathematician Turns Novelist.”  Host Tom Hall pointed out that the theme of a trinity appears often throughout the book, and Suri admitted that even he didn’t pick up on the theme until late in his writing process. “I actually gave up this novel, and I started a new novel, and I told my agent ‘This is not going to work.’ I even had a mathematical proof that this novel could not be completed. .. and then when I saw the number three, I realized that these three characters have to somehow come together,” Suri said.

On January 29, the Washington Post praised “The City of Devi” by Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, in a review by Ron Charles.

Proclaiming it “the best sex comedy of the year about nuclear war between India and Pakistan,” Charles commends the book for the fact that it “never dips toward cynicism, never loses its essential sweetness, no matter how cruel or kooky the action… the whole story manages to keep hurtling along toward a surprisingly tender ending.”

“Even amid the wondrous variety of contemporary Indian fiction, Suri’s work stands apart, mingling comedy and death, eroticism and politics, godhood and Bollywood like no one else,” he wrote.

The full review can be read here.

Baltimore magazine reviewed Manil Suri’s latest book, The City of Devi, in the February 2013 issue.  Calling the book “a preculiar love story that’s both tawdry and hopeful,” the magazine says that it is “super-charged by religion, sexuality, and the overarching political conflict.”

The magazine also posted a Q and A with the mathematics and statistics professor on their website, where they asked Suri about teaching a math class for non-math majors.  “It taught me that without at least some basic motivation on the part of the learner, it’s simply impossible to engage people in mathematics, no matter how interesting or fun you make it. The subject is difficult, and for the students who were genuinely curious (and were ready to put in the effort), it was a great class. I’ve now taught a bunch of such courses, and they’ve been essential experience for a ‘math novel’ I’m working on,” he said.

Suri will read from The City of Devi on Febraury 6 at 7 p.m. in the Library Gallery.

The Department of Mathematics and Statistics hosts Dr. Qin Wang of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) for its Fall 2012 Statistics Colloquium this Friday, October 26, from 11am to 12pm in Room 401 of the Mathematic and Psychology (MP) building.

Dr. Wang’s contribution for this week is entitled “A general SDR approach via Hellinger integral of order two.” It deals with the concept of sufficient dimension reduction (SDR), which according to the abstract is “a useful tool to study the dependence between a response and a multidimensional predictor.” The focus will be on a new approach to SDR called the Hellinger Integral of order two, a collaboration between Wang and Drs. Xiangrong Yin at University of Georgia and Frank Critchley at The Open University of UK, and which has a number of advantages such of minimal assumptions, relative effiency, and its unitary aspects of previous methodologies, among others.

Refreshments will be available in MP 422 before the event. Those desiring to meet with Dr. Wang should e-mail Dr. Yaakov Malinkovsky at yaakovm@umbc.edu.

In fall 2011, Michele Osherow, associate professor of English, and Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, collaborated to jointly teach a freshman seminar, “Mathematics and What It Means to be Human,” in which they explored the connections between the two disciplines.

They are discussing their collaboration, and its challenges, in a three-part series on The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the first part of the series, the two discuss what led them to teach the class, and their experiences in planning it.

“Ever since the word problems my father forced on us at dinner, I’ve always been terrified of math,” Osherow says. “Manil had made the math in the play [Arcadia] interesting and almost familiar; the complexities hypnotized me a bit… Might the allure of mathematics captivate the incoming freshmen? Hard to tell, but if it could, I was sure Manil was the person to supply it.”

“When Michele tantalized me with a whole semester’s worth of such highs with a class full of enthusiastic (OK, at least captive) students, the endorphin factory in my brain went into high alert,” writes Suri.

In the second installment of the series, the two discuss the challenges of teaching the course (including their own conflicts), and watching their students discover the connections between the disciplines.

“I think the students liked those days when Manil and I went at it. I liked those moments, too, because I not only had to confront another perspective head on but also had to challenge my own. I loved seeing the baffled expressions of the students while their instructors disagreed; the things we were asking them to consider were perplexing and appropriate,” writes Osherow.

“They’d now glimpsed the future: the digitalization of the humanities, the emphasis on statistical and quantified evidence, the interconnectedness of human experience,” says Suri.

In the third, and final, installment, the two professors write about the students’ final projects (“Mathematically deepest of all was an instrumental composition that musically interpreted what it means to be a sine (or cosine) function—by a humanities scholar inspired to take calculus this semester,” writes Suri) and the ultimate value of the class.

“Though there are a lot—I won’t say infinite, but an impressive batch of natural numbers’ worth—of moments I’d redo if I could, I would not have missed out on co-teaching this seminar, tricky as it was. There is a language to mathematics, and I’m devoted to seeing what language produces and provokes.,” Osherow concludes.