Trip to Madrid

Trip to Madrid:


In the last week of August 2006 I visited Madrid, Spain to attend a conference, ICM 2006, the biggest conference of Mathematics, organised once in four years.

This was really unique experience of life. There were more than 4000 people, all mathematicians, gathered at one place to discuss Mathematics. I travelled with a group of people starting from Mumbai. We reached one day before when the conference was suppose to start. The day one, has opening ceremony, where Fields Medal is awarded. 'Fields Medal' is ultimate award given in Mathematics, equivalent to Nobel Prize of natural sciences (there is no Nobel Prize in Maths). So witnessing it live was really thrilling to me. The king of Spain himself was presiding over the ceremony and handed over the medals. This time 'Fields Medal' was awarded to four persons. One of them G. Perleman who has solved one of the greatest conjecture (Geometrization conjecture and Poincare conjecture about 3-dimensional manifolds) standing for 100 years refused to accept the award. Knowing before hand this situation the committee of Fields Medal went ahead and announced the prize to him. For them announcing prize to him is acknowledgement of Mathematical Community of his work. This has started a great tradition and has made sure that history will keep track of him. They would have kept it anyway.

The ICM 2006 was held in 'Palacio Municipal de Congress' which has 2 huge auditoriums. I attended many plenary lectures and enjoyed it. Most of these lectures were not technical in nature and were intended to give overview of the topic. Beside that I attended sessions of my interest. NBHM (Govt. of India) has put up a stall where we had kept few books published in India, means containing the Mathematics done in India, just to advertise about ourselves and a lot of tourism information about India. It was really great to know that there were a lot of people who were interested in India. By the way it is a great honour to India that we are going to host next ICM in 2006. It will be held in Hyderabad.

I enjoyed the city Madrid very much. I have a lot of good memories from there. I did not know a single word of Spanish and most of the people over there do not speak English and hence we use to have tough time moving around. But the people over there were really helpful. The city Madrid has been home to some of the greatest painters of the history. The likes of Goya, Velazquez, Picasso are just few to name. The museum 'Del Perado' has collection of a lot of paintings of these great painters which makes it must see. Even not being so enthusiast about arts I got myself completely lost in there. You can not just ignore those great paintings. On Sunday we went to a nearby city 'Toledo' which is an old town. It was a really nice day spent over there. We just kept walking all day there in the city and did some shopping, mostly buying souvenir material.

finally cam back to India after spending roughly 10 days there.