Who is the workshop for and what does it feature? This annual event is aimed at students of classes XI and XII. This year's edition will feature four one-hour talks by Professors Amritanshu Prasad (IMSc), B V Rao (CMI), Arindama Singh (IIT), and Kotyada Srinivas (IMSc). For the titles and abstracts of the talks, please click on the "Timetable" link above.
There will also be a short written quiz towards the end of the day, the purpose of which is not at all to 'test' or 'grade' the participating students but only to incentivize them to pay close attention to the talks. Thus the quiz is 'open notes' and based on the material covered in the talks. Participants are encouraged to listen attentively, take notes, and clear their doubts by asking questions. Books will be distributed as prizes to the top scorers on the quiz but no certificates will be issued.
The workshop is free. No fee of any kind is being charged. Lunch, snacks, and beverages will be provided free of cost to all participants.
How to register for participation? We are inviting schools in Chennai to nominate up to five students each to attend the workshop. (The students can be from classes XI and XII, but together the total number of nominations allowed is limited to a maximum of five.) Invitations to the schools on our address list (which by no means is complete) are being sent by regular mail (ordinary post). Wherever email is available, we are also sending the invitations by email. We are also sending out email alerts to all school teachers whose addresses figure on our database with the request that they ensure participation of their respective schools.
Each school may also optionally nominate one maths teacher to accompany its students as escort. The escort will be able to follow the lectures on CCTV and is invited for lunch and snacks (free of cost). We request help of the escorts in grading the quiz.
To nominate students for participation, all that the head (or other representative) of the school has to do is to send an email to maths.outreach.imsc@gmail.com clearly indicating the following:
Deadline for sending nominations: Nominations will be accepted, mostly on a first-come-first-served basis, until we reach our capacity. It is recommended that you respond quickly: last year we were overbooked and had to stop accepting nominations.
Confirmation of nominations: Once the nominating email from a school is received and accepted, the name of the school (along with the names of students) will be added to the list of participants. While this list will be updated frequently, please do allow a few days time for the name of your school to show up on it.
My school would like to participate but we have not received an invitation. What to do? Please consider yourself invited and send an email: see the instructions in the "How to register for participation?" section above.
I am a student of class XI / XII. My school is not participating. Can I myself register to participate?: We generally prefer students to come through their schools. But we will consider requests from individual students, with preference being given to those from schools that are not participating. Such a student may send an email to the address mentioned above with the following information: name of the student, name of the school, brief writeup (not exceeding 100 words) about why he/she is interested in participating. Names of the selected students will be included in the list of participants.
The report (including videos and notes of lectures) of last year's workshop is here.
Links to some of the other maths outreach activities of IMSc (past,
present, and future) maybe found here.
Explanation of the title: The title is an allusion to the famous quote "Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety nine per cent perspiration", attributed to Edison. The workshop is an attempt to provide a bit of inspiration. For any inspiration to have effect, it must be backed up by a lot of hard work ("ninety nine per cent perspiration"), which message we hope is not lost on the participants.
Organizers: K N Raghavan knr-at-imsc-dot-res-dot-in, K Srinivas srini-at-imsc-dot-res-dot-in, Sankaran Viswanath svis-at-imsc-dot-res-dot-in