Travels, 5

It was a great relief to see someone waving to us as we came out of the baggage hall in Kochi Airport, compared to the rather frightening difficulties I had last time here on the three occasions I was at the airport.

Aparna Lakshmanan and her student had come to collect us. It was a great pleasure to meet Aparna, after writing a book, her hosting the research discussion on graphs and groups, and several other interactions. To celebrate the day, the monsoon rains had cleared for one day only and the weather was beautiful as we drove into Kochi to the hotel, almost opposite the University.

Aparna asked me to see her student Midhuna Ajith, which I was happy to do soon after our arrival. (We didn’t feel the need of any lunch, after the pleasant snacks on the plane.) We had a good discussion and I posed a couple of problems to her. After this and a rest, it was dinnertime, so we went to the hotel restaurant, a place with a very varied cuisine, and enjoyed their buffet. As we were about to leave, the waiter showed us a photograph of us that he had taken earlier, and promised to send a copy. (The restaurant was almost empty and he had plenty of time to show us the dishes, put some on our plates, and escort us to a table.)

So the conference time started as it was to go on. Overnight, the fan in the room mysteriously turned itself on in the middle of the night; though it was a bit distracting at first, I was able to get a reasonable night’s sleep.

Up in the morning, and breakfasted, in time to meet Lavanya Selvaganesh in the hotel lobby. She is my coauthor on three papers, including one of the first to come out of the graphs and groups research discussion (though I was last to join the team in that case). Her husband and her student had come along too, and we were able to have a good discussion about new projects, doing mathematics research, and various other things.

Then there was some free time before lunch, so Vijay took us to the Kerala Museum. Well worth a visit; it had some remarkable art works, both modern and old, including a large collection of miniatures, many of them from Moghul times. One of the latter, most remarkably, showed a king on a throne in front of his courtiers, reading something from his iPad (clearly identified as such by a long cable connecting it to the power supply)! But the most dramatic exhibit was a diorama showing the history of Kerala from the legendary figure of Parasurama throwing his axe to claim his territory, to the modern day, including Hermann Gundert, the German missionary and linguist who produced the first Malayalam-English dictionary, and also happened to be the grandfather of the novelist Hermann Hesse whose biography was the last thing I had read in London before catching the plane).

Back to the hotel, and it was lunchtime. Unlike breakfast and dinner, which are buffet-style, lunch was ordered from a menu and included sandwiches, which we ordered along with mango milk shakes. The sandwiches were rather minimal, on sliced white bread, but took a long time to come, so I had to email my next appointment, Asir, and ask to delay the meeting by half an hour. He was agreeable to that.

So no time for a rest after lunch before Asir came. We had a long and good talk, touching on many things including the need for a book surveying the subject of graphs on groups. (He was one of the authors of the book about graphs on rings, so he has form; it would be very nice to have a keen coauthor to do some of the legwork.)

Back upstairs after the long conversation, I sat down to do a crossword, but found my eyes closing. When I awoke, there had been a shower of rain, and the sun had come out and was sparkling on the leaves of the tree outside our window.

I brought myself back to consciousness. Rosemary had just started doing a batch of laundry when the phone rang, and my last appointment of the day had arrived. Hiranya Kishore Dey had brought Angsuman Das and a student. We began with a friendly chat, and then moved on to mathematics. They all had interesting problems that they were working on, and my part was to try to think up useful suggestions that might help with some of these. One example: Can there be two different non-abelian finite simple groups that have exactly the same numbers of subgroups? Almost certainly no, but it is a question which doesn’t suggest an easy method of attack, though I have some ideas.

Then it was dinnertime, so down to the restaurant for another tasty buffet including grilled fish and peppered chicken. So back to the room, to think about the conference opening tomorrow and then go to bed, hoping to wake in time!