Mathematicians like to say Alfred Nobel’s wife was seduced by the Swedish number cruncher Gosta Mittag-Leffler, and that’s why there’s no Nobel prize in maths. Balderdash! Nobel never had a wife.
Canadian John Charles Fields made up for the short shrift given to number wizards with the Fields Medal. Unlike Nobel honours, which are usually given to sages past their prime, the Fields Medal is given to nerds below 40.
Fields Medal, too, has been partial. Since its inception in 1936 it wasn’t awarded to any woman, till 2014. That was when Maryam Mirzakhani of Iran claimed it.
Iran? A land that forces women to cover their heads and prevent girls from going to school? Yes and no. Iran’s laws expect women to wear the hijab, but they encourage girls to go to school. So much so, there are more girls studying medicine in Iran than boys; and, nearly half (47 per cent) of the students in universities are girls.
With all the dogmatism under a theocratic regime, Iranians have been proudly owning up their pre-Islamic glory when sciences flourished under the Achaemenids, the Parthians and the Sasanians, and building up on them to explore the frontiers of modern western science.
Just as India was once thought to be a land of snake-charmers and fakirs who climbed ropes, the west and the western-influenced elite elsewhere think of the entire Islamic world as lands of burqa-clad women and men who tie tea-towels around their heads. That’s exactly why the world hasn’t fathomed how Iran has developed the techno-wizardry that has helped it stand firm and fight for nearly a month against the combined missile bashing by the world’s most powerful country and the region’s strongest. A two-front war that even India dreads.
Like in the case of India post-1974 and 1998 nuclear tests, western sanctions have only boosted Iran’s home-grown technologies. When tech was denied they invented it, just as we did in the case of supercomputers, rocket gyros and carbon-carbon missile nose cones. Compared with ours, their life under sanctions has been longer in time and harder in severity; consequently, their innovations have been more successful. When their Arab neighbours were spending billions to buy F-16s, Abrams tanks, and Patriot missile-knockers, Iran was investing their fewer billions in knowledge industries as also developing and building their own war-fighting gizmos.
Spending close to four per cent of GDP on R&D (India spends a paltry 0.7 per cent; the US four), Iran is among the world’s top 25 (top 10 in a few) in nanotech, AI, robotics, pharmaceuticals, and other frontier technologies. With 4.35 million (2017 figures) students in more than 2,000 universities (India has fewer than 1,300), and more than a quarter of them in engineering sciences, Iran is not only the knowledge leader in the Islamic world, but is aspiring to be among the world leaders in technology. With all the sanctions in place, students are state-funded to enrol in western universities, and sages from abroad are invited to lecture in Iranian institutions. A decade-old count revealed that one in four Iranian PhD students was enrolled abroad, the majority in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, France, Sweden and Italy.
Much of this transition has come about under the ayatollahs. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been particularly stressing on building a strong S&T foundation. His 20-year programme unveiled in 2005 called for an investment of $3.7 trillion to fund the transition from an oil-selling state into a techno-power.
The question is: was all the bombing by Don and Bibi aimed at knocking all this off?
prasannan@theweek.in