institute of advanced studies€¦ · institute of advanced studies, singapore nanyang...

Institute ofAdvanced Studies,

SingaporeNanyang Technological University

ISSUE 22 • April 2018

Editor-In-Chief: Prof Phua Kok Khoo, Director, Institute of Advanced Studies, NTU, Singapore

New ASEAN Federation of

Physics Societies

Sharing ofRobert Kuok:

A Memoir

Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, a memorial

conference for Robert Brout

10th International Science Youth Forum withNobel Laureates and Eminent Scientists

CONTENTSFEATURES

4 10th International Science Youth Forum with Nobel Laureates and Eminent Scientists in Singapore

8 Sharing of Robert Kuok: A Memoir

10 IAS-NTU Plays Host to the Official Establishment of AFPS during ASEAN 50

13 Topical Workshop on Dark Matter

15 Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, a memorial conference for Robert Brout

20 Third International Conference on 2D Materials and Technology

CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS

24 Singapore and Hong Kong: Comparative Perspective on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Handover

28 The Orchid Symposium: From Fundamental Research to Medical Applications

30 Mega Photonics Conference in Singapore

8

24

10

32 Frontiers of Physics: Nurturing ASEAN’s Participation in Large- Scale Fundamental Physics Research

4

36 Nanyang Quantum 2017: Workshop on Quantum Correlations and Resources Beyond Entanglement

Editor-in-ChiefPHUA Kok Khoo

MembersKWEK Leong ChuanLOW Hwee BoonXIONG ChiChris ONGLouis LIMCharlotte WEEWONG Wai KitErin ONG

PUBLIC LECTURES

38 "Looking to the Frontiers of Fundamental Science" by Nobel Laureate Prof David Gross

40 "Dark Matter" by Nobel Laureate Prof Frank Wilczek and "How Our Universe Was Made" by Prof Carlos Frenk

42 Reflections on Prof Ngee- Pong Chang's Public Lecture: "Where is the Quantum in our Life?"

44 "Cosmic Questions in Physics" by Prof Ngee- Pong Chang

45 "Xiamen University Malaysia: The Pioneer of Chinese University Overseas Campus" by Prof Ruifang Wang

SPECIAL ARTICLE

47 A Tribute to Fields Medallist Prof Vladimir Voevodsky

FORTHCOMING EVENTS

38

40

47

Institute of Advanced StudiesNanyang Executive Centre60 Nanyang View #02-18 Singapore 639673Tel: (65) 6790 6491Fax: (65) 6794 4941Website: http://www.ntu.edu.sg/ias

ISSN 1793-5678

IAS NEWSLETTER | FEATURES

4 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

10th International Science Youth Forum with Nobel Laureates and Eminent Scientists in SingaporeBy Ooi Ren An and Flanders Eiw Hwa Chong Institution

T he 10th edition of the International Science Youth Forum (ISYF) was successfully held from 21 to 25

January 2018. It was jointly organised by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Hwa Chong Institution, with strong support from the Ministry of Education. Serving as a platform for the top science students worldwide to engage in cross-cultural exchange and meaningful interactions with eminent scientists, ISYF has once again greatly benefited its participants.

We were privileged to host seven eminent scientists: Sir Fraser Stoddart (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 2016), Sir

Tim Hunt (Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine 2001), Prof Ada E. Yonath (Nobel Laureate in Chemistry 2009), Prof Claude Cohen-Tannoudji (Nobel Laureate in Physics 1997), Prof Klaus von Klitzing (Nobel Laureate in Physics 1985), Prof François Englert (Nobel Laureate in Physics 2013), and Sir Michael Atiyah (Fields Medallist, 1996).

2018 is a special year. The year where ISYF transcends an important chronological frontier: It’s 10th anniversary. Since the inception of ISYF in 2009, the event has always inspired passion for science amongst students and educators alike. Growing from a regional event to an

FEATURES | IAS NEWSLETTER

ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 5

international forum, the evolution of ISYF through the 10 years has been breathtaking. While we reminisce upon the achievements of the past, we also look ahead to our scientific future.

The theme “Transcending Frontiers” was hence chosen as a recognition of the milestone we have reached, and the numerous scientific boundaries that mankind has surpassed. At many points throughout history, it was thought that mankind has learnt all there was to learn about science. Yet, scientists have time and again proven that we are capable of continually exceeding our preconceived limits in scientific exploration. In an era of rapid technological advancements and unpredictable change, it is indeed exciting to gaze at the current borders of science and ponder the boundless possibilities that lie

behind. We hope that ISYF has inspired its participants to further their interests in science, and in doing so, be motivated to make a difference in the scientific world.

A total of 121 participants and 46 educators from all around the world gathered in Singapore to visit our advanced research facilities, beginning with an excursion to various renowned industries and universities, including 3M, Procter & Gamble, Singapore University of Science and Technology (SUTD), A*StartCentral, NUS Demo Lab, and Fusionworld.

During the various excursions, participants were engaged in both inspiring talks and exciting hands-on activities. Besides being exposed to areas of science outside their current school curriculum, they also gained valuable

The Straits Times article on the 10th ISYF (25 January 2018).



Prof Chorng Haur Sow demonstrating the wonders of Physics during his lecture at NUS.

Masterclass: Nobel Laureate Prof Klaus von-Klitzing addressing a question from a delegate.

The winning team from Sekolah Sultan Alam Shah, Malaysia, presenting their research poster to A*STAR judges.

insights on the future of science in Singapore. Positive feedback on the visits were given by the participants.

Delegates also had the opportunity to visit Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and its various schools, namely the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences (SPMS), School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE), School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCSE) and the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine).

Every school provided our students with unique and thrilling experiences. At MAE, students were given the opportunity to build their very own mini rockets; at SCSE, students programmed their own robots and put them through a navigation test on a mini track. The delegates thoroughly enjoyed themselves, with some even requesting for the sessions to be longer.

The Research Poster Competition on 22 January saw a record 34 research projects presented by our aspiring young scientists from across the globe. Prominent scientists from A*STAR were invited to judge the posters, based on the students’ creativity, data collection and interpretation, as well as poster presentation. The types of projects ranged from Chemistry to Engineering, Medicine to Informatics. After intense competition in the preliminary rounds, three groups entered the finals where they had the opportunity to present their projects to Nobel Laureates Prof Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Sir Tim Hunt. Following much deliberation, the decision was made and the team from Sekolah Sultan Alam Shah, Malaysia was presented with the top award. The team presented their novel design of an underwater remote-controlled vehicle drone (ROV), which is more affordable and practical than the current bulky industrial ROVs.

Students and educators also got the rare opportunity to meet with top scientists from around the world, including the Nobel Laureates and Fields Medallist. Participants satisfied their hunger for knowledge through meaningful discussions with these scientists.



In the Masterclasses, the scientists conducted lectures explaining their groundbreaking work, as well as their very own take on the sub-theme “That Eureka Moment”. They shared that while the concept of a Eureka moment is exciting to consider, their scientific marvels often stemmed from tireless persistence, consistent hard work, and never-ending curiosity.

In the dialogue sessions, the scientists discussed an interesting sub-theme: “After the Prize”. Although many admire the journey taken by the scientists and their achievements, few consider the lives of scientists after reaching these milestones. Participants not only gained insight into the scientists' work, but also how the Nobel Prize has transformed their lives and their work.

Apart from science, ISYF also served as an excellent platform for cross-cultural exchange. During each of the six Cultural Hour sessions, delegations took turns to showcase their country’s unique culture. The presentations ranged from dances, to musical performances and games. At the Cultural Exhibition, participants visited 18 booths showcasing the cultural vibrancy in ISYF. The cultural elements enabled everyone to gain a deeper understanding into one another's traditions and customs, forging strong cross-cultural friendships in the process.

The Grand Ceremony Nobel Forum held on 23 January was the pinnacle of discourse at ISYF. Moderated by Prof San Ling, Provost and Vice President (Academic) of Nanyang Technological University, the forum brought together three Nobel Laureates and Eminent Scientists – Prof Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Prof Klaus von Klitzing and Sir Michael Atiyah. The panellists tackled the subtheme “Is Science under Attack?”, addressing questions related to the threats facing new scientific theories, and the future of science. The ceremony was graced by Dr Janil Puthucheary, then Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Education. In his speech, he reassured the audience about the bright future of scientific research in Singapore and emphasised the government’s support for R&D in the 21st century.

Five days of interaction with fellow delegates, educators, Nobel Laureates and Eminent Scientists culminated in the Closing Ceremony at the Conrad Centennial Hotel. ISYF has allowed like-minded peers to explore their interests in science, and appreciate the diversity of cultures. Though the event was only five days long, participants have forged unforgettable memories, which will certainly remain etched in their minds for many years to come. ▪

Prof San Ling introducing the three esteemed panellists at the Grand Ceremony Nobel Forum.




Sharing of Robert Kuok: A Memoir

K nown as the “Sugar King” and the richest

man in Malay s i a , Mr Robert Kuok owns Kuok Group, which has interest in hotels, real estate and commodities. Educated in Raffles Institution, he founded the world’s first S hang r i -L a Hote l i n Singapore in 1971. His enterprising achievements in South East Asia and China has been perceived as an amazing feat by many around the world. Since the publication of the memoir, it has received international attention, especially in Singapore and Malaysia.

IAS and Nanyang Centre of Public Administration at NTU co-organised the Chinese public lecture to discuss the memoir on 27 January 2018 at the Nanyang Executive Centre. Chaired by Prof Soon Beng Chew (Deputy Director, Nanyang Centre for Public Administration, NTU), the three esteemed speakers were Prof Chih Lien Huang (Founding Director, The Institute for Sustainable Development, Macau University of Science and Technology), Prof Kok Khoo Phua (Director, IAS) and Mr King Siang Su (Vice-Chairman, Johor Bahru Chinese Heritage Museum). Around 200 people

attended, including audience from overseas such as Malaysia and China.

Mr Su shared some stories about Mr Kuok growing up in Johor Bahru, as well as his humble and amiable attitude as the locals have known him for. His Massimo Bread, a product made from boycotted flour – processed by his mills – received wide acclaim due to his popularity in Malaysia. The public also appreciated the fact that he retained his Malaysian citizenship and the identity of a Malaysian Chinese in a context marked by high migration rates among the Chinese population.

Next, Prof Phua highlighted three learning points for the younger generation of Singaporeans. First, they had much to learn from Mr Kuok’s entrepreneurial spirit, one which was characteristic of overseas Chinese communities and encouraged the new generation to follow in his footsteps. Second, Prof Phua pointed out how perseverance, effort and regard for quality was generally lacking among the young in Singapore. Such characteristics may be perceived as the product of Chinese culture, coupled with the influence of Western education that Mr Kuok had received. These characteristics, while keeping in mind one’s roots and initial mindset, should be emulated by the new generation. Third, the younger generation should develop an appetite for learning through reading. Mr

(From left) Mr King Siang Su, Prof Soon Beng Chew (chairman of the panel discussion), Prof Kok Khoo Phua, and Prof Chih Lien Huang at the panel discussion.

By Jeremy Goh History, School of Humanities, NTU




Kuok's success could be partly explained by his keenness on lifelong learning from different sources such as books, as well as his friends and business competitors. He would invest his leisure time in classical music among other hobbies to find a balance in his life and expand his interests.

Separately, Prof Huang gave an overview of Mr Kuok’s career development across changing political and economic contexts. Prof Huang credited the personality and management philosophy of Mr Kuok as the ultimate factors which realised his business empire aspirations.

He described how Mr Kuok’s early education at Raffles Institution was instrumental to his subsequent business success. In school, he gained the opportunity to develop ties with social elites while the diversity of the student population exposed him to different cultures and languages. Such influences had facilitated the transregional expansion of his businesses.

In addition, Prof Huang pointed out Mr Kuok’s ambivalence towards British colonialism. He managed to expand his businesses owing to his education at Raffles Institution – a colonial establishment – and connections with the British colonial officials during the late 1940s and 1950s. However, the British abandoned Malaya and Singapore during World War II, and killed one of Mr Kuok’s brothers, who was fighting for the Malayan Communist Party during the Emergency. Such ambivalence also applied to his relations with the Malaysian government. He had expanded his enterprise

under the aegis of the early Prime Ministers of the Federation. Nonetheless, he staunchly opposed to the racialism caused by the state’s Bumiputra policies. He was also against the political division of Malaysia and Singapore in 1965. Despite such stances, he served as the mediator in handling the split of the Malaysia-Singapore Airlines during this period.

Moving on, Prof Huang elaborated on the international scale of Mr Kuok’s business empire. Prof Huang cited the global Shangri-La hotel and resort chain, which was first set up in Singapore based on his prior experiences from staying in London’s hotels. The establishment of this chain involved collaboration with the Americans, who initially declined due to his criticism of America’s involvement in the Indochina wars. Nonetheless, cooperation ensued owing to Mr Kuok’s broad social networks regionally and globally.

Prof Huang also touched on the key role played by Mr Kuok’s mother who offered advice on major business decisions, including his decision to act as a middleman in the Malaysia-Singapore Airlines split and to enter the China market. Particularly, her decision to split the inheritance – left by Mr Kuok’s father – equally amongst the siblings brought harmony that was essential to the family business’s continued growth.

The interesting public lecture lasted three hours and received an enthusiastic response and good reviews from the audience. ▪

Members of the audience taking notes and listening enthusiastically to the speakers.


10 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

IAS-NTU Plays Host to the Official Establishment of AFPS during ASEAN 50By Clarissa Ai Ling Lee Jeffrey Sachs Center on Sustainable Development

O n 29 Augus t 2017 , on the ve r y month commemorating the 50th year of the formation of

ASEAN, physicists representing ten ASEAN countries came together in a meeting to endorse the charter that saw, at long last, the official establishment of a very-much desired ASEAN Federation of Physics Societies (AFPS). The establishment of the AFPS is an important milestone for the professional physics community in ASEAN as it will serve as a platform for:

i) building stronger foundations in physics education and research in the region,

ii) facilitating the sharing of information and collaboration across the member states,

iii) improving equity in the distribution and accessing of resources across the ASEAN physics communities, and

iv) consolidating ASEAN’s ability to collectively negotiate and participate in inter-regional collaborations with other regional physical societies.

Most importantly, the establishment of the AFPS could accord physics with a higher status and recognition within individual ASEAN countries while at the same time, catalyse the formation of physical societies in ASEAN countries that are still without. The official formation of the AFPS is a major milestone after months of behind-the-scenes painstaking work involving the drafting of the charter, constitution, and by-laws.

The meeting began with opening remarks by Prof Kok Khoo Phua, Mr Chee King Tan and Prof Rajdeep Singh

Rawat; each respectively representing the IAS NTU, ASEAN Sociocultural Committee and Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Singapore’s Institute of Physics. Each speaker was in agreement that concrete steps have to be taken to ensure that ASEAN, after 50 years in existence, should finally attain a level playing scientific field with other advanced regions and international organisations, with the most important step being the building up of new generations of able physicists to tackle the growing challenges in the field.

Prof Siaw Kiang Chou, board advisor from the ASEAN Committee on Science and Technology (COST) emphasised the importance of drawing on the particular expertise of the physicists to bear on the nine sub-committees underlying the ASEAN COST, at least three of which could be seen as intersecting with the areas of

ASEAN delegates signing the constitution and by-laws for the setting up of ASEAN Federation of Physics Societies.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 11

the physical sciences in the form of materials science and technology, meteorology and geophysics, as well as space technology and its applications. If presentations from the ASEAN member states are any indication, we could see that the common high priority research areas for most lie in the area of materials physics, computation and electronic physics, engineering physics, and also nuclear physics, all of which are possibly selected because of their applications in sustainability projects.

It is encouraging that in spite of limitations, there is fundamental physics research going on in member states like Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam that have established international collaborations with other Asian and European centres of research. What is needed now is an approach for establishing broader collaborations in a manner that would strengthen the region rather than merely benefitting a single member state. A stronger regional scientific community would bring benefits to each member state over the longer term as centres for high quality research could then be established locally and regionally, therefore building up the critical mass needed for doing high capacity physics research.

Prof Chou spoke of how important it is to continue the pursuit of international collaborations and dialogues with

international partners as had been done since the early days of the establishment of ASEAN, but with more engagement from the physicists. He is of the view that the mediation of a strategic organisation such as the AFPS could contribute immensely to improving on the implementation of the four strategic thrusts set out in the ASEAN Plan of Action on Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) that would be put into action between the years 2016 and 2025. The four thrusts aim to encourage inter-sectoral collaborations; talent mobility, connectivity and inclusiveness; public awareness of STI-related matters; and the establishment of systems that could lead to smart STI-relevant partnerships – 2015 was the first year that innovation was added to the science and technology dyad. There is also an ASEAN Science, Technology and Innovation Fund (ASTIF) that has been established to provide seed funding for approved projects of regional STI concerns.

The session was then dedicated to a painstaking enumeration of the charter, constitution and by-laws of AFPS, with the participating member states contributing towards pushing forward the agenda of the AFPS to ensure the organisation’s sustainability while not repeating the mistakes of previous regional organisations that had been set up to advance the cause of the physical

Delegates and observers were wreathed in smiles at the AFPS meeting.


12 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

sciences. Attention was also paid to ensure that the details of the charter, constitution and by-laws do not contradict each other and could sustain the long-term health of the organisation.

The afternoon involved presentations by representatives of each country delegation – the presentations moved between how to address the urgent needs of many of the still-developing countries of ASEAN and how the member states could come together to address matters of regional importance. One of the key issues that came up multiple times was concern over the low number of physics students at all levels; therefore, the number of graduate students in ASEAN are in the low hundreds. This is surprising, given that ASEAN also includes countries with physics departments that had been established during the first half of the twentieth century, including Myanmar, Singapore and Malaysia; one could argue that the low figures are the result of national policies and the lack of prestige accorded to the field in the region.

Nevertheless, some of the presentations pointed to the importance of turning national events, such as some of the national-level physics conferences and congresses, into regionally coordinated events, while at the same time, facilitating more exchanges among physicists across national-level research groups, organising more joint physics schools and participating actively in regional network-building activities. There was also a call from Myanmar to take into account the needs of the minorities in the physics communities of ASEAN, especially women and the LGBTQ groups.

The afternoon session concluded with the historic signing of the charter, therefore establishing officially, a memorandum of understanding among the physics communities of the ten ASEAN countries that will see a more concerted effort towards developing collaborations in the institution of training programmes, periodic conferences aimed at establishing regional research excellence, and the reconfiguration of research and developmental priorities for enhancing capacity-building. The witnesses to the official establishment of the AFPS included senior and eminent CERN physicists, Professors

ASEAN representatives of the signed AFPS Charter:

1. Mohd. Khairul Zarifi Bin Haji Masri (Universiti Brunei Darussalam, Brunei Darussalam)

2. Chan Oeurn Chey (Royal University of Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia)

3. Mitra Djamal (Indonesian Physical Society, Republic of Indonesia)

4. Khamphouth Phommasone (University of Laos, Lao People’s Democratic Republic)

5. Kurunathan Ratnavelu (Malaysian Institute of Physics, Malaysia)

6. Pho Kaung (University of Yangon, Union of Myanmar)

7. Cristine Villagonzalo (Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas, Republic of the Philippines)

8. Rajdeep Singh Rawat (Institute of Physics Singapore, Republic of Singapore)

9. Boonrucksar Soonthornthum (Siam Physics Society, Kingdom of Thailand)

10. Nguyen Dai Hung (Vietnam Physical Society, Socialist Republic of Vietnam)

Emmanuel Tsesmelis, John Ellis and Albert De Roeck; Prof Yifang Wang, Director of the Institue of High Enrgy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Prof Di Li, National Astronomical Observatories in China; and Prof Shangjr Gwo, Director of NSRRC in Taiwan. Also present were the Minister for Education and Science from the Sakha Republic of the Russian Federation and his delegates.

Prof Phua was elected as the President of AFPS and IAS NTU will serve as the AFPS secretariat for one term (three years). ▪


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 13

Topical Workshop on Dark MatterBy Clarissa Ai Ling Lee Jeffrey Sachs Center on Sustainable Development and Judy Yeo World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd

T he three-day event hosted by the Institute of Advanced Studies at Nanyang Technological

University (NTU) drew experts in the field from around the world. 21 speakers, including Karim Benabed (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris) via Skype, convened at NTU to discuss the present state of research in dark matter. The presentations ranged from where progress had been made to speculative conditions that still abound, although it appears that there is now increased knowledge of the range of what-if conditions that should be given more attention. Audience numbers stood at around 160 and included graduate students, high school students, physics educators and physicists. The workshop was one of the first events co-organised by the newly incorporated ASEAN Federation of Physics Societies.

Dark matter, which is currently known to consist of non-baryonic matter (baryonic matter making up that part of the universe that could be observed), is part of the origins of the story of universe. It is the part that appears to have cooled and subsided into an echo that still holds the key to many unresolved physics puzzles. While we do not really know what dark matter is, there is evidence of certain physical and phenomenological manifestations that appear causally incompatible with the visible part of the universe, in that they manifest effects that are incompatible with the baryonic matter making up our visible universe.

Currently, direct and indirect observations of dark matter are made through radio telescopes, dedicated satellites and other low to high-energy gaseous, atomic, and particle detectors, including new forthcoming gamma-ray detecting satellites, such as HERD (High Energy Radiation Detector) from China and GAMMA-400

Prof Frank Wilczek (Nobel Laureate in Physics 2004) spoke on “New Ideas for Axion Searches” at the workshop.

Prof Carlos Frenk’s (Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society 2014) talk was on “A conclusive test of cold dark matter”.

Prof Karim Benabed (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris) delivered his talk “Planck insights on Dark Matter” via Skype.


14 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

from Russia. Global consortiums from Europe, the US and Asia have formed to produce multi-era and multi-directional collections of data which are then analysed and juxtaposed against each other to produce better triggers, identification and distinction between desired signal and background effects.

The first day of the conference saw presentations that surveyed the state of dark matter searches, the deployment of large scale simulation (such as the EAGLE project) for doing cosmological ‘experiment’, theoretical discussion on the necessity of dark matter and how we might have to change our current understanding of the classical-quantum world to come up with theoretical proposals that are different from current ones, as well as specific arguments on why some of the candidates that had been put up for discussion (neutrinos and axions) matter. Speakers on day one included Professors Lars Bergström, Frank Wilczek, Carlos Frenk, Joakim Edsjö, Ali Chamseddine, Erik Verlinde and Karim Benabed.

The second day of the workshop included more detailed reports on experiments involved in searches, with

presenters almost evenly split over the neutrinos versus axions debate. Speakers on the day included Professors Alexey Boyarsky, Oleg Ruchayskiy, Ilias Cholis, Michael Tobar, Pierre Sikivie, Kentaro Miuchi and Gianfranco Bertone.

The last day of the workshop saw presentations on the development of instrumentation for dark matter searches as well as preliminary results from collaborations in the study of rare particle decay and therefore, of dark matter. Presentations were made by Professors Henry Tsz-King Wong, Luca Grandi, Elisabetta Barberio, Chang Jin, Jianglai Liu and Richard Gaitskell.

The three-day intensive workshop left participants both excited and ambivalent over the road ahead and the empty space, both in technology and physics, that have to be filled. The workshop also provided insight into the range of multilateral big-data experiments and simulations reflecting the attempts and biases in the dark matter research community. ▪

The conference celebrated Prof Lars Brink’s (Former Chairman of the Nobel Physics Committee, second from left) birthday at the dinner banquet. We wish him good health!


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 15

Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, a memorial conference for Robert BroutBy Lars Brink Chalmers University of Technology

T he world around us is rich in phenomena. Despite the complexities this might entail, it is amazing

that mankind has been able to find the basic laws that govern much of the underlying dynamics of such phenomena - laws that are simple enough for human understanding and to base our fundamental theories on. These theories always contain a lot of symmetries. It is often said that in quantum mechanical systems, all phenomena that occur are not forbidden by symmetries. How can it then be that we see such a variety of phenomena in the physical world? The answer is that in the ground state – the lowest energy state – the system, unless manipulated, does not need to show all these symmetries. This phenomenon is called “Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking” and was championed by Yoichiro Nambu and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008 for his work on the topic.

Nambu’s discoveries in 1959-60 led to the discovery of the Brout-Englert-Higgs (BEH) effect in 1964, which is the mechanism by which the particles get their masses by keeping all the good properties of the unbroken theory. The key to the establishment of this effect was the discovery of the H-particle at CERN in 2012, a discovery

for which François Englert and Peter Higgs were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. Unfortunately, the third collaborator, Robert Brout, had passed away in 2011. The Electro-Weak gauge theory developed by Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg was based on the BEH-effect and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1979. This theory was also based on the proof by Gerard ‘t Hooft and Martinus Veltman whereby such non-abelian gauge theories are indeed renormalisable and hence can be true physical theories. They were given the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1999.

Modern physical theories can take a long time and huge investments to prove. 48 years passed between the theoretical discovery of the BEH effect and its final experimental verification, too long a period for Robert Brout to witness his work bear fruit. This year, he would have been 90 years of age. The Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore decided to have a memorial conference for this giant in physics who has contributed so much to modern basic physics. The conference was held from 16 to 19 January 2018 and had 25 world-class speakers, 3 Nobel Laureates, one Fields medallist and


16 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

winners of the Breakthrough Prize – the world’s largest science prize – the Wolf Prize, the Gruber Prize, the BBVA Prize, as well as other prize winners, and over 100 participants.

Since spontaneous symmetry breaking is such a fundamental concept not only in particle physics but also in cosmology, statistical physics, condensed matter theory and molecular physics, the conference endeavoured to cover its effects and importance in all these fields. It is in fact one of the aims of the IAS to organise such transdisciplinary conferences which challenge the speakers to be able to reach out to an audience with special interests in different fields of modern physics, and when they do, can be quite rewarding for the audience. A year ago, a similar conference on the “90 Years of Quantum Mechanics” was quite a success and this year’s conference was inspired in the same spirit.

The conference’s first talk was given by Nobel Laureate François Englert, the chair of honour for the conference and long-time collaborator of Robert Brout. He talked about the early days when they met at Cornell in 1959 and immediately started a very successful collaboration that lasted for more than 50 years. They were very much inspired by Nambu’s work on spontaneous symmetry breaking in superconductivity and Goldstone’s ensuing work, and Englert presented his first work at Cornell that

dealt with the spin-wave as a Nambu-Goldstone boson of ferromagnetism. He then discussed their work that led to the BEH-effect and the fate of the Nambu-Goldstone particle in gauge theories. He ended the talk by describing how they in the latter part of the 1970’s took these ideas to cosmology and laid the ground for inflationary theories which show how the universe can expand exponentially during a certain epoch in the early universe. What they called "firewall" then was later termed as "inflation".

The next talk was given by Kazuo Fujikawa. He started by reminding the audience of Yoichiro Nambu, who passed away three years ago and would have been 97 in 2018. He then showed that the old famous result of Bohr and Mottelson - for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 - could be interpreted as spontaneous symmetry breaking in nuclear physics. He also discussed Majorana neutrinos, which are important in the so-called “see-saw” mechanism to give mass to neutrinos, as Bogoliubov quasi-particles.

The talk on the history and the present status of particle physics in hindsight of spontaneous symmetry breaking was given by John Ellis and Peter Jenni. John Ellis discussed how the original ideas from the 1960s were suggested by him and his collaborators to be possible to check experimentally in the late 1970s even though they were extremely careful in their statements. This eventually

Nobel Laureate Prof François Englert, the Honorary Chair of the conferenc, shared with the audience the story behind the lasting collaboration and his lifelong friendshp with Robert Brout.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 17

led to the decision to build first Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) and then Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN to hunt the H-particle. Peter Jenni described all these efforts and the present status of the experiments and the session ended with a discussion about the future and what we can expect from it.

The first day’s afternoon session started with a talk by Édouard Brezin on the importance of spontaneous symmetry breaking in statistical physics. He gave a comprehensive review of energy and entropy, spontaneous magnetisation of the Ising model, phase transformations without symmetry-breaking sources or without symmetry, Landau-Ginzburg theory of the Meissner effect and then the renormalisation era. He ended with a discussion on disordered systems.

It was followed by Robin Stinchcombe, who also talked about symmetry breaking in statistical physics. He entered Cornell one year after Englert and had been introduced to the Brout-Englert ideas there. He recalled Brout’s book from 1965 on phase transitions and on other results from Brout in the early 1960s. He then went on to talk about his renormalisation group ideas on percolations from the 1970s and ended with a discussion on non-equilibrium dynamics.

The day ended with a talk by Robert Brout’s former student Willy Fischler. He talked about his recent research on θQCD and θQED in the Standard Model and their relation to spontaneous symmetry breaking.

The second day was more devoted to cosmology. The first talk by Malcolm Perry dealt with his work with Stephen Hawking and Andrew Strominger on the Bondi-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) symmetry in gravity and electrodynamics, and the infinite number of Nambu-Goldstone states in conjunction with the spontaneous symmetry breaking of this symmetry and their possible role in giving the black holes the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.

He was followed by Renata Kallosh who talked about maximal supergravity and its applications to cosmology. The maximally supersymmetric supergravity theory, N=8

Supergravity, is known to have a vastly improved ultraviolet behaviour thanks to the high degree of supersymmetry. She discussed recent results on the finiteness of the higher order terms in the scattering amplitudes and the possibility that the theory could indeed by finite to all orders. In her second half, she described how supergravity could constrain the possible cosmology and discussed the B-mode detection that probes nature at energies a billion times higher than LHC.

She was followed by Viatcheslav Mukhanov who discussed the beginning of the universe. It was first suggested by the Belgian priest and physicist George Lemaître in 1931 that the universe could have started as a quantum fluctuation and Mukhanov explained his results from 1981 and by Stephen Hawking from the year after on how these theories now have been experimentally verified to great accuracy with the Planck satellite.

Another speaker on a similar subject was Eliezer Rabinovici who discussed phases of gauge theories and gravity in terms of spontaneous symmetry breaking of space-times symmetries and also some consequences of breaking of conformal symmetry and scale invariance. He ended with a discussion on phase transitions in String Theory.

One of the successors of Brout and Englert in Brussels is Jean-Marie Frére. He talked about Standard Model physics and especially, on the subject of how weak is the weak interaction, and the border between weak and strong interaction.

There were two talks on order and disorder in statistical systems, the first by Sidney Nagel who started by saying that crystal symmetry is the essence of order and asked the questions: What is the essence of disorder? What non-linear process leads to complete disorder? He described jamming which is a different way of forming solids and asked if such matter is different from crystals. He compared these two forms and showed that they differ and concluded that jamming is the epitome of disorder. He gave many examples of such systems and showed a lot of investigations into these matters. Michael


18 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

Aizenman gave a talk on the decay of correlations under quenched disorder. He showed how quenched disorder affects phase transitions and showed many rigorous results on these issues.

The first speaker on the third day was Nobel Laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft. He described very carefully the BEH–effect and the issue of spontaneous symmetry breaking in gauge theories. He discussed the difference between the global case and the local one and pointed out that in the local case there are already massless particles and hence long-range order, so the effect is opposite to the global case where a long-range force is obtained. The local case is not strictly speaking spontaneous symmetry breaking, since the vacuum does not break the local symmetry at all. He further pointed out that BEH and its effect on mass spectra is everywhere in today’s particle models as in QED (superconductivity) but also in gravity.

He was followed by Jean Iliopoulos, who gave a historical review of spontaneous symmetry breaking both in the global case, such as with the chiral symmetry, and the local case. He also described spontaneous breaking of supersymmetry which leads to a Nambu-Goldstone spinor and asked where this could be. It is not the neutrino which we now know has a mass.

Sir Michael Atiyah, who was the only pure mathematician among the speakers, talked about the relation between mathematics and physics and about his physics idols, James Clark Maxwell and Paul Dirac. He brought up the issue about the continuum space and time and questioned if now is the time to examine it again. In the entire talk, he emphasised that the mathematical models should be as simple as possible and follow Occam’s razor – a philosophy principle that says when in a situation with multiple theoretical answers to a problem, it is best to choose the answer with the fewest assumptions.

Yaron Oz talked about a slightly different theme – the connection between gravity and turbulence, which have been seen through the use of AdS/CFT duality. In this perspective he discussed spontaneous scale breaking, turbulence field theory and the effect of the scale anomaly on intermittency.

Hirosi Ooguri gave a talk based on modern insights of symmetry, which is based on various types of dualities where two seemingly different microscopic Lagrangians with different gauge symmetries and different matter content can describe the same quantum system. He further emphasised that there are no global symmetries in gravity and gave a counterexample on how this would violate the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula. He further discussed how one can reconstruct the bulk spacetime by quantum entanglement.

Mikhail Shaposhnikov talked about the Standard Model and its completion with the discovery of the H-boson and the fact that if the mass of the H-boson is put to zero then the Lagrangian has a wider symmetry. It is scale and conformally invariant. However, that symmetry is broken by quantum corrections, found by Coleman and Weinberg

Nobel Laureate Prof Gerard ‘t Hooft described the BEH–effect and the issue of spontaneous symmetry breaking in gauge theories.

Sir Michael Atiyah (Fields Medallist 1966) was the only pure mathematician among the speakers. He talked about the relation between mathematics and physics.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 19

a long time ago. Can this solve the hierarchy problem in the Standard Model? He outlined various possibilities and argued that new physics must be just around the corner, a fact that was also emphasised in John Ellis’ talk.

Finally, in the fourth day the more mainstream condensed matter talks were presented. Bert Halperin talked about particle-hole symmetry in a partially full Landau level. He first reminded the audience of the fractional quantum Hall effect. In the massless limit and the cyclotron energy infinite, there is a particle-hole symmetry. This can be broken by impurity effects, and one can test this by measuring the thermal conductance in a quantised Hall state. He ended by describing a composite fermion description for the fractional quantised Hall states.

Duncan Haldane’s (Nobel Laureate in Physics 2016) talk discussed topological order versus broken symmetry. Topological ordered states have been shown to be very important in many aspects of condensed matter but also in quantum field theories. Topology can really protect symmetries. He discussed the fractional Hall effect in terms of these considerations and showed a broad spectrum of phenomena where topology is very important.

The final talks dealt with symmetry breaking in other systems. Mats Larsson discussed symmetry breaking and chirality in molecular physics and biology. Complex molecules can have a chirality and come in two forms called enantiomers that are mirror images of each other. The human cells can react differently to the two forms

and a famous example from the late 1950s was the use of Thalidomide as a medicine. The R-form is a sedative and the S-form led to limb reduction defects on foetuses. An interesting fact about molecules in cells is that they often preserve chirality even though it costs energy. We do not know why. All these issues raise deep questions about what is life and how it can be sustained, which will be issues for research in the future to come.

Yun-Feng Xiao showed another area where spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs – namely in an ultrahigh-Q microcavity. He described light-matter interactions in optical physics and applied photonics and showed the example of cavity optomechanics. The symmetry can be broken which leads to chiral optical fields with important applications in the unidirectional microlaser, in particle detection and in optical gyroscopes. His second part dealt with spontaneous symmetry breaking in optical systems and showed a host of results from his research group.

The last speaker of the conference was Philippe Spindel, a long-time friend and collaborator of Robert Brout. He had, as a starting point, stated the fact that the universe must have started as a quantum fluctuation. If you go near a cosmological singularity, spacelike gradients become negligible compared to timelike ones, and the universe behaves in a chaotic way. By studying this problem in a supergravity theory, one can treat the quantum mechanical operators as a rank-3 Kac-Moody algebra and a spinorial extension of the Weyl group and he gave a detailed description of this work.

The description of the various talks should be perceived as an appetiser to listen to the talks. The recordings are available on the IAS Youtube channel at https://youtu.be/YH0coIh5kNA

The Institute of Advanced Studies is proud to have organised this conference. It brought together a large number of world-class speakers and honoured one of the greatest and most inventive physicists of the last century. Among the participants were many young researchers from the ASEAN countries which we hope and believe are motivated to do high-class research in some of the many fields exposed to them. ▪

Nobel Laureate Prof Duncan Haldane discussed topological order versus broken symmetry.


20 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

Third International Conferenceon 2D Materials and TechnologyBy Ting Yu School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, NTU

F ollowing the success of the International Conference on Two-Dimensional Layered Materials in

Hangzhou (2014, China) and Hong Kong (2016, China), and the International Symposium on Physics and Device Application of Two-Dimensional Materials in Nanjing (2015, China) and Shanghai (2016, China), the 3rd International Conference on 2D Materials and Technology (ICON-2DMAT 2017) was hosted in the School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at Nanyang Technological University (NTU, Singapore) from 11 to 14 December 2017. It was cooperatively organised by the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at NTU, National University of Singapore (NUS), and Materials Research Society of Singapore, and strongly sponsored by a large number of worldwide notable publishing groups, including Nature Publishing Group (NPG), Cell, American Chemical Society (ACS), Wiley,

Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), World Scientific Publishing, IOP Publishing, Science China Press, etc., and other equipment companies. The 2017 conference brought together researchers, developers and users from all over the world to share cutting-edge results, explore new areas of research and development, and discuss emerging issues facing 2D materials.

Graphene-like 2D materials have recently gained renewed interest due to their unique optoelectronic properties and potential applications. 2D layered materials (2DLM) are now one of the most active fields of research in materials science, condensed matter physics, and chemistry. This conference covered the scalable growth, basic physical and chemical properties, and industr ial applications in electronics and optoelectronics of all 2D materials.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 21

With six plenary speakers and 18 keynote speakers among hundreds of invited speakers, the conference consisted of five 2D material-corresponding symposiums: synthesis, controllable growth and characterisations; chemistry of 2D materials for energy, catalysis and sensing applications; structural, electronic, optical and magnetic properties; theory and simulation and devices and applications in electronics, photonics and optoelectronics.

The conference chairpersons, Prof Hua Zhang (NTU) and Prof Andrew Wee (NUS), commenced the first day with their welcome speeches, sharing their insights of the 2D field. Over the three days of talks, many distinguished scientists were also present at this special occasion including Prof Zhongfan Liu (Peking University), Prof Steven Louie (UC Berkeley), Prof Xiaodong Xu (University of Washington), Prof Antonio Castro Neto (NUS), Prof Manish Chhowalla (Rutgers University) and Prof Atac Imamoglu (ETH Zurich). Various topics were thoroughly discussed during the conference, with plenary and keynote talks igniting the curiosity of the audience.

The first plenary talk was given by Prof Antonio Castro Neto, Director of the Center for Advanced 2D Materials, Singapore. He pointed out that the field of 2D materials is one of the fastest growing fields in condensed matter.

Hundreds of new 2D compounds are now available with a plethora of new properties, including many-body states such as magnetism, charge density wave, and superconductivity. Not only basic science is evolving fast but also applications of these materials, especially graphene. After that, he shared some of the developments and new discoveries of the last few years.

Prof Atac Imamoglu (ETH Zurich) kicked off his talk with a perfect mirror based on transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD) monolayer when incident light is resonant with its optical bandgap. He also presented spectroscopy of gate-tunable monolayer MoSe2 exhibiting strongly bound exciton-polaron and trion and even fermi polaron resonances, and non-perturbative coupling to a DBR microcavity mode. He showed that such strong many-body interactions induce strong valley polarisation of charged excitons under vertical magnetic field.

Van der Waals heterostructures have recently aroused a new emerging research field of 2D materials due to their unique and exotic optical and optoelectronic properties and optimal device performances. Prof Young-Hee Lee (Sungkyunwan University, South Korea) presented a talk “Van der Waals 2D heterostructures for optoelectronics” where he discussed his team’s research, which had achieved very good electrical and optoelectronic device

Prof Hailin Peng and Prof Shuyun Zhou (third and fourth from left respectively) were the recipients of the Singapore MRS-ICON 2DMAT Young Scientist Award. With them are (from left) Profs Qihua Xiong, Yuan-Ping Feng, Andrew Wee and Hua Zhang.


22 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

performances and was published in several ACS NANO papers. In the 2D van der Waals heterostructure growth field, Prof Xiangfeng Duan (University of California) has contributed plenty of notable and significant works to 2D heterostructures research field which have been published in Science, Nature Photonics, Joule, etc. In his talk, he shared his group’s recent achievements regarding the epitaxial growth of 2D heterostructures and proposed the opportunities and challenges of 2D materials and their heterostructures.

Prof Zhongfan Liu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), depicted his goal of building the footstone of future graphene industry from the material synthesis point of view. His team have succeeded in growing high-quality graphene films on traditional glasses – the graphene endowed glass with extremely high thermal and electrical conductivities, leading to a new type of super graphene glasses. Similarly, the graphene film has been deposited onto optical fibers under a high-temperature growth process, creating a graphene-decorated optical fiber. Various promising applications are demonstrated with these super graphene glasses and graphene-covered optical fibers.

Prof Steven Louie (University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, USA) followed with a plenary talk about “Interaction and Topological Effects in the Fascinating Quantum World of Atomically Thin Two-dimensional Materials”. He presented some fascinating physical phenomena discovered in recent studies of atomically thin 2D materials. A number of highly interesting and unexpected behaviors were found – strongly bound excitons with unusual energy level structures and novel optical selection rules; massless excitons; tunable magnetic and plasmonic properties; electron super-collimation by disorders; and novel topological phases – adding to the promise of these 2D materials for valuable applications.

Besides the growth topic of 2D heterostructure, the topics of the basic optical studies and alley-spin physics in 2D heterostructures have also been discussed. Prof Wang Yao (University of Hong Kong, China) depicts his findings of “valley-spin phenomena in the moiré of van der Waals heterostructures”. He presented his group’s discovery of varieties of valley and spin phenomena that make possible their manipulations in the 2D semiconductors and their heterostructures. His work promotes the development of

The conference was well-attended, attracting young researchers and scientists from all over the world.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 23

2D materials application in valleytronic devices, which is a warm welcome to the incoming quantum information era.

Keynote speaker Prof Yoshihiro Iwasa (University of Tokyo) shared his knowledge on exciton transport and optoelectronic devices in 2D and 1D transition metal dichalcogenides. One of the key findings is Exciton Hall effect in monolayer MoS2. Prof Ping-Heng Tan (CAS) gave a talk on Raman spectroscopy of two-dimensional materials. In twisted multilayer graphene, there is a significant enhancement of the C modes due to resonance with new optically allowed electronic transitions, determined by the relative orientation of the layers. His team have found that twisting has a small effect on LBMs, quite different from the case of the C modes. Their work shows that ultralow-frequency Raman spectroscopy is an ideal tool to uncover the interface coupling of 2D hybrids and heterostructures.

In his plenary talk, Prof Manish Chhowalla (Rutgers University) showed his great interest in phase transformation of 2D Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TMDs). While a substantial amount of effort by the 2D

community has been devoted to semiconducting 2D TMDs, he focused his efforts on the metallic phases of these materials. The metallic phase of MoS2 and WS2 provides some of the best non-precious metal catalysts for the hydrogen evolution reaction, exhibits outstanding per formance as energy storage e lectrodes for supercapacitors and can be used to achieve exceptionally low contact resistance in 2D channel-based field effect transistors. His team have also utilised metallic 2D materials to reduce CO2 to methane. These amazing properties demonstrate that ultra-thin metals possess properties that are dramatically different and are of both fundamental and technological significance.

Plenary speaker Prof Xiaodong Xu (University of Washington) depicted his findings on a new type of 2D material called 2D magnets. He introduced MOKE study on van der Waals magnets, CrI3. After demonstrating the existence of isolated single layer semiconductor with intrinsic Ising ferromagnetism, he showed that the layer number is dependent on spin ordering and corresponded magnetic phases. The novel behaviour is explored in monolayer WSe2/CrI3 ferromagnetic semiconductor heterostructures, including ferromagnetic control of circular polarisation in WSe2 via exchange field, and optical analog of giant magnetoresistance effect.

Prof Yuanbo Zhang (Fudan University) gave a talk about gate tunable 2D materials. His team fabricated ionic field-effect transistor, in which gate-controlled Li ion intercalation modulates the material properties of layered crystals of 1T-TaS2. The resulting electrical doping modulates the energetics of various charge-ordered states in 1T-TaS2 and generates a series of phase transitions in few layer samples. The charge-density wave (CDW) states in 1T-TaS2 collapse in the two-dimensional limit at critical thicknesses. Meanwhile, at low temperatures, multiple phase transitions have been observed, from Mott- insu la tor to meta l in th in f l akes , and superconductivity evolves from CDW state induced by ionic gating. ▪

Participants were eager to discuss their findings and research during the poster session.

IAS NEWSLETTER | CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS

24 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

Singapore and Hong Kong: Comparative Perspective on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the HandoverBy Joshua Ng Nanyang Technological University

T he Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), held a workshop

titled, “Singapore and Hong Kong: Comparative Perspective on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Handover” on 4 September 2017 at the Parkroyal Hotel on Pickering.

The workshop was co-organised with the Nanyang Centre for Public Administration and the Hong Kong Singapore Business Association (HSBA).

The invited speakers included:

1. Prof Gungwu Wang (Chairman of ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute and East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore)

2. Prof Da Hsuan Feng (Former Vice President for Research and Graduate Education, University of Texas at Dallas)

(From left) Dr Haiming Liang, Prof Wanda Guo, Prof Sin Tze Ker, Prof John Wong, Prof Gungwu Wang, Prof Kok Khoo Phua, Prof Da Hsuan Feng, Mr Antony Leung, Prof Alex Law, Mr Dennis Chiu, Prof Hou Min Yan, and Mr Jinlin Yang.

CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS | IAS NEWSLETTER

ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 25

3. Dr Wanda Guo (Executive Vice President, China Development Institute, Shenzhen)

4. Prof Sin Tze Ker (Former Consul-General in Hong Kong; Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore)

5. Prof Alex Law (Former Professor, School of Biological Sciences, NTU)

6. Mr Antony Leung (Former Financial Secretary of Hong Kong; Group Chair and CEO, Nan Fung Group)

7. Dr Haiming Liang (Chairman and Chief Economist, China Silk Road iValley Research Institute)

8. Prof John Wong (Former Director, East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore)

9. Prof Hou Min Yan (Dean of the Faculty of Business, City University of Hong Kong)

10. Mr Jinlin Yang (Founder, Yang Jin Lin New Media)

10987

4 5 6

321


26 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

In his welcome address, Prof Kok Khoo Phua (Director, IAS) explained that this workshop was conceived in line with IAS’ renewed focus on inter-disciplinary topics, with a panel of experts in disciplines spanning both social and natural sciences.

In his opening remarks, Prof Gungwu Wang highlighted the similar roots of both Singapore and Hong Kong as British colonies heavily dependent on entrepot trade. The Singapore of today is characterised by the concept of “Separation” – Singapore’s history is rife with separations that has influenced its identity today. Hong Kong is characterised by the slogan “One Country, Two Systems (OCTS)”. Prof Wang posits that Hong Kong’s warm reception of China’s OCTS proposal is linked to their understanding and acceptance of Hong Kong as a site of dissent. Both cities are poised to become key players in the global economy, especially with the advent of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The speakers elaborated on various aspects of the two cities, drawing out similarities and differences and highlighting areas of potential collaboration.

Mr Antony Leung briefly touched on OCTS in his talk “Two Pearls on the Maritime Silk Road, a Tale of Two Competing Cities: The Lion City is leading, what should Hong Kong do?”. He believed that Beijing will retain OCTS permanently if Hong Kong remains stable and successful for the next 30 years. However, he noted that Hong Kong is currently “lagging” behind Singapore in the global economy and must take steps to remain competitive for the next 30 years and beyond.

Prof John Wong expounded on the gap between Singapore and Hong Kong by tracing their different approaches to restructuring their economies in his talk “Hong Kong and Singapore: No More Mirror Image of Each Other?”. Hong Kong allowed labour-intensive manufacturing industries to shift across the border to the cheaper Guangdong so it could focus on service sector. The Hong Kong government has cited this as a success of its “positive non-intervention” policy. On the other hand, Singapore government played an active role in its

economic restructuring, introducing policies that pressured labour-intensive industries to restructure and offered enterprises assistance in manpower training and R&D. It devoted resources to education and housing at the expense of healthcare and social welfare. Prof Wong concluded that strong and active government policies are necessary to adapt responsively to the changing global economy.

Prof Sin Tze Ker identified the most pressing challenges facing Hong Kong and Singapore in his talk “Problems and Challenges for Hong Kong and Singapore”. Hong Kong suffered from a lack of political support as its Chief Executive cannot be aligned with any political party by law. This made it difficult to pass bills. OCTS was also noted to be a challenge, as young Hongkongers have been expressing dissatisfaction with the government over a lack of freedom of speech. However, Prof Ker posited that their unhappiness actually stems from practical issues, such as the rising cost of living and lack of affordable housing.

When it came to Singapore, Prof Ker feared that Singaporeans may become too reliant on the government for welfare. Singapore also had to remain vigilant in its approach to small nation diplomacy and beware of how our actions in the region might be interpreted as taking sides with the geopolitical powers that influence the region. He concluded that Singapore needs strong political leadership and that there is a need to convince the younger generation that we need strong leadership over democracy, as Singapore has no “Grandfather” to rely on, unlike Hong Kong.

Dr Wanda Guo segued to discuss Shenzhen, a city that owes its economy to neighbouring Hong Kong, in his talk “Shenzhen – Hong Kong: Review and Outlook”. From 1980 to 1997, the two cities shared a “stores in front, factories in back” model. Manufacturing industries were concentrated in Shenzhen, with much of the demand coming from the service industries in Hong Kong. Shenzhen’s economy has grown quicker than Hong Kong’s since then, with a prosperous high-tech industry developing in Shenzhen. Dr Guo also explored


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 27

possibilities for the two cities to contribute to each other’s development following the decline of the “stores in front, factories in back” model.

Mr Jinlin Yang returned the discussion to Singapore-Hong Kong relations in his talk “The Height and Limit of Hong Kong and Singapore’s Development: The Next 20 Years”. According to Mr Yang, Hong Kong and China will see closer economic interaction and cooperation over the next 20 years, with its functional role shifting towards regionalisation. Its status as a Special Administrative Region of China will limit its economic opportunities, and any interaction Singapore has with Hong Kong must recognise this limit.

Prof Da Hsuan Feng noted that it would be a “colossal mistake” to discuss Singapore and Hong Kong without considering China’s impact on the two. In his talk “Singapore and Hong Kong: Twins Basking in a Chinese Presence”, he said China had grown three centuries in the

The panel experts sharing their insights with attentive audience.

past 3½ decades with its rapid economic growth, forcing other countries to adjust to its abrupt presence on the global stage. In his opinion, the biggest change within China is its wealth penetrating the general population, creating a massive middle class of 300 million Chinese with disposable income.

The concluding panel discussion saw Prof Feng cautioning that Singapore should seriously consider scaling with Malaysia as one metropolis, like Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Future competition will be between metropolises, not cities. Singapore must acknowledge that we are joined at the hip with Malaysia and turn a blind eye to our history together so as to prepare for the future together. Around 150 participants attended the thought-provoking and intriguing workshop. ▪


28 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

The Orchid Symposium:From FundamentalResearch to Medical ApplicationsBy Wu Chao National University of Singapore

T he Orchid Symposium: From Fundamental Research to Medical Applications was held from 8

to 9 November 2017 at the Nanyang Executive Centre (NEC) in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. The symposium covered areas related to orchids, including the mechanism of orchid flower development, applications of orchids as Chinese herbs, cultivation and post-harvest handling of orchids, the development of the orchid market in Southeast Asia, and orchid virus research. The symposium also celebrated the 80th birthday of Prof Choy Sin Hew, one of the world’s leading scientists in orchid physiology.

In his opening address, the Guest-of-Honour Prof Guaning Su (President Emeritus, NTU), commended Prof Hew for his contribution in guiding students in orchid studies, helping the local orchid industry compete

at the international market level, and putting Singapore onto the world map. During the workshop, scientists from Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, Malaysia, Macau and Singapore presented their recent discoveries in orchid basic research and in medical research. Many of Prof Hew’s students expressed their gratitude for being an inspiration in their academic life.

A graduate from the former Nanyang University in 1960 with a BSc degree in Biology, and a PhD degree from Queen's University in Canada, Prof Hew has devoted his career to orchid research on theory and on application. He has published three books and over 100 articles in refereed journals. He has won many awards during his career, including the 1997 National Science Award, the highest honour conferred to scientists for significant scientific achievements in Singapore, and the National University of Singapore (NUS) Meritorious Teaching Award for his contribution in guiding students in orchid studies. Aside from his academic career in NTU and NUS, he has also served in many other professional and government bodies in Singapore.

The symposium ended with an overview of “30 years of Orchid Virus Research in Singapore”, presented by Prof Sek Man Wong (NUS), one of Prof Hew’s honor students from the former Nanyang University. We look forward to the next orchid symposium and wish Prof Hew good health! ▪

Prof Guaning Su (Emeritus President, NTU) giving his welcome address at the opening ceremony.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 29

Speakers and participants of the Orchid Symposium held at the Nanyang Executive Centre (NEC) in NTU.

Shin Min Daily News on the Orchid Symposium (7 November 2017)


30 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

Mega Photonics Conferencein SingaporeBy Prof Shum Ping Director, Centre for Optical Fibre Technology, NTU

C o-organised with the Institute of Advanced Studies at NTU, the

mega photonics conference was held from 31 July to 4 August 2017 at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore. The aim of the conference was to foster interactions among broad disciplines in the photonics family. It brought together international leading researchers, scientists and engineers who are actively working on lasers and their applications, nanophotonics, metamaterial, biophotonics, plasmonics, optical devices, optical transmission and optical networking, optical fibers, optical switching system and related technologies. The conference combined the following three major international conferences, which widely cover the field of “Photonics” from devices to systems and networks:

• The 12th Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Pacific Rim (CLEO-PR 2017)

• The 22nd OptoElectronics and Communications Conference (OECC 2017)

• The 5th Photonics Global Conference 2017 (PGC 2017)

This was the first time the CLEO-PR and OECC conferences were hosted in Singapore.

Conference grand opening ceremony.

Nobel Laureate Prof William Moerner delivering his plenary talk.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 31

Parallel to CLEO-PR, OECC and PGC 2017, a student-led Photonics Global Student Conference was held in conjunction with the mega conference. Jointly organised by the IEEE Photonics Society (IPS) Singapore Student Chapter, the NTU and NUS Student Chapters of OSA (The Optical Society) and the SPIE Singapore Student Chapter, it sought to promote worldwide communication amongst the younger generation by inviting brilliant students from 14 countries to network and share their research.

The students had the opportunity to attend keynote speeches by the presidents of IPS and OSA, Profs Kent D. Choquette and Eric Mazur respectively, as well as talks by an editor of Nature Photonics and a leader from a photonics start-up. They also had a glimpse of further insights from lab tours to various photonics labs.

The mega conference also served to put into spotlight the Women in Photonics. Sponsored by the IPS, the breakout session saw distinguished female professors, scientists, entrepreneurs and researchers from eight countries – the UK, Australia, China, Singapore, India, Brazil, Italy and Malaysia – sharing experiences and insights related to their research, career and life. The audience also had the opportunity to interact actively with the speakers via an engaging panel discussion.

This mega photonics conference is the biggest platform in Singapore for researchers around the world to exchange ideas and latest research results. Papers presenting original work in, but not limited to, the technical symposia/special sessions were invited for submission. More information about the programme details can be found in the following weblink: http://photonics2017.org/index.php ▪

A number of awards were given out at the conference, including (clockwise from top left) the Nature Photonics Best Paper Awards, OSA Young Scientist Awards, IEEE Photonics Society Best Paper Awards, and even an Instagram Competition!


32 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

Frontiers of Physics:Nurturing ASEAN’s Participationin Large-Scale Fundamental Physics ResearchBy Clarissa Ai Ling Lee Jeffrey Sachs Center on Sustainable Development

A s one’s economy improves, the opportunities one gets to partake in more scientific endeavours

improve as states are vying with each other to become leading centres of cutting-edge science. The formation of the AFPS (ASEAN Federation of Physics Societies) aims to take advantage of increased regional interests within ASEAN to move beyond bread-and-butter science to become more active participants in forging the development of physics at the frontier. Therefore, the Frontiers of Physics workshop, held on 30 August 2017, aims to raise the ambitions of the research agenda of the

ASEAN countries while catalysing the next level of international collaborations with the more developed scientific communities in Asia and Europe.

The workshop was not just about reporting on the future potential of cutting-edge big collaborative experiments presently taking place at the different regions of Europe and Northeast Asia; neither was it about knowledge transfer from technologies developed from fundamental scientific research to operations and solutions-oriented research. Moreover, the presentations had a more pressing

Speakers and participants posing for group photograph at the ASEAN Workshop on Frontiers of Physics 2017 in partnership with CERN.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 33

purpose behind them beyond exciting the audience with a laundry list of exciting possibilities in fundamental physics research.

Instead, the workshop was about sharing information about the resources, facilities and possibilities in physics that could be utilised by members of the ASEAN physics communities, to encourage commensal collaboration that could bring the current status of scientific activities, and members of the ASEAN physics communities, within reach of epoch-making physics knowledge production.

The area of physics identified as having that potential for positioning ASEAN more keenly within the domain of curiosity-driven fundamental research are particle physics, astrophysics and other allied areas of physics. However, particle physics has a special place in the ASEAN community not merely because of its ability to scale up and down across other scientific fields (from elementary particle physics to cosmology and space science), but also because of the historical role the former had played in the early days of the development of modern physics in ASEAN. Moreover, as the AFPS is keen to connect with its nearer neighbours within the Australasian region, countries such as China, Japan,

South Korea and Taiwan provide ample opportunities for collaboration and facilities access, especially in the area of high to low-energy physics.

Although material and energy science remains primary to the research agenda of ASEAN, and applied physics research for developmental purposes is a consistent feature of the region, the main message from the workshop is that fundamental research should be viewed as equally important, and as naturally coexisting with applied research, for making scientific progress that is of value to society. Moreover, engineering feats as a result of developing the best research instruments available for fundamental physics could contribute solutions to mundane problems, such as the ability to transmute nuclear spent fuel from power plants when the proton centred Accelerator–Driven Subcritical (ADS) system reaches approximately 1 GeV.

At this time, the CERN school that had been taking place annually at various countries had also taken place in the ASEAN region in Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, among others. To date, all of the ASEAN countries have developed relationships with CERN, from having initiated first contact to becoming full-fledged members within some of the experimental collaborations. Both Malaysia and Thailand are members of the CMS collaboration while the Philippines and Singapore have direct association with CMS. Indonesia is a member of the ALICE collaboration while at least nine of the ASEAN countries are now sending summer students to CERN.

In his opening address, Prof Emmanuel Tsesmelis spoke of how CERN could contribute more to the development of physics research and development in ASEAN such as by contributing computer servers and the establishment of digital libraries (the latter of which CERN has been pioneering since the early days of the Internet). Prof Tsesmelis also highlighted the multi-level and multi-layered processes involved in the confirmation of the discovery of the Higgs boson, with the possibility of there being a composite of Higgs bosons of which the earliest discovered form is an inkling of more to come. More importantly, he spoke about the expertise involved in

Prof Phua delivering his welcome speech at the ASEAN Workshop.


34 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

building up the collaborations at CERN, especially the important contributions made by graduate students who came from all over the world, to contribute brainpower towards accelerating the progress of the discoveries being made.

In his address, Prof Albert De Roeck of the CMS collaboration confirmed that the urgency involved in dealing with the massive amount of data produced by the experiments at CERN meant that the necessity of having a strong international grid of expert analysts to sort through all the data produced in search of new physics has further increased. Prof John Ellis listed some important areas of research in the high energy particle physics domain that are important for resolving some of the still unexplained fundamental problems: dark matter, the origin of dark matter, masses of neutrinos, the hierarchy problem, inflation, and quantum gravity – all of which could find resolution through what would be a major breakthrough should supersymmetry, a discovery

that would herald new physics both predicted and unprecedented, become a reality. The importance of big-scale international collaborations for building a grid that could support data processing and management was duly emphasised in the case of China, which is upsizing tremendously, the scale of its extant big-science, and therefore pre-existing big-data operations.

Even as the next generation circular and linear colliders are being built at CERN to edge closer to the exploration of the abovementioned fundamental physics, China has been developing in parallel, the futuristic CepC (circular electron-positron collider) and the SPPC (super proton-proton collider) that would allow for more penetrative study of the composite profile of the Higgs boson and of other exotic events not yet predicted through the Standard Model of particle physics. As far back as 1984, China had begun developing its own massive laboratories for big science exploration in fundamental areas of physics – China is a good example of a country that had

Prof John Ellis (CERN) enthralling the audience with his talk “Particle Physics Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond”.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 35

benefited from the technologies of the Soviets as well as technologies it was able to access from beyond the Eastern bloc. Besides being involved in numerous international collaborations, China has built up enough capacity to run internal collaborations. For instance, in the search of dark matter physics, a 2400-metre deep laboratory at Liangshan in Southern Sichuan called the China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CPJL) has been in operation since 2010; this laboratory now has entered phase 2. The High Energy Radiation Detector (HERD) will join the already launched Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) at the Chinese Space Station by 2020/2021, while a Higher-Energy Photon Source will be constructed by this year.

For explorations into blackhole and other extra-terrestrial signals emanating from other galaxies, the Five-Hundred Meter Array Spherical Telescope (FAST) in the form of cable mesh and 4500 triangular reflectors had been painstakingly calibrated in relation to the ambient conditions of the telescope’s location. After its official opening in 2016, built as it was, on the curvature provided by a natural depression at Guizhou, China, the facility is now preparing for the next phase of data-taking as well as to open up for more international collaborations and other interested independent international users. Among the areas of research channelled through FAST are the hydrogen 21cm line, pulsars, molecules (due to the ease in which complex molecules could be produced in space) as well as the famous SETI project, all of which could now be taken to new heights. There are aspirations for astronomy, through its relationship to high energy astrophysics, to reach a level of precision in detection and measurement that is usually associated with high energy particle physics. As the engineering of the instruments improve in their precision and ability to scale into higher energy levels across the micro- and macro-scales, the probability of identifying exotic physical entities also improves, as is demonstrated by the recent discovery of two new pulsars from the family of the neutron stars of the 47 Tucanae globular clusters by FAST and an exotic tetraquark hadron by the newly extended Beijing electron Spectrometer that is now already in phase three of its development, and expected to be in operation until at least 2021.

In Taiwan, the National Synchroton Radiation Research Center (NSRRC), is a major photon source that produces high-intensity but low-emittance rays at hard and soft x-ray wavelengths that provide high-resolution spectroscopic measurement and 44 beamlines comprising beam energy in the order of 3 GeV, thereby making the facility highly suited for multidisciplinary research in engineering, biomedicine, and chemistry, among others. Although the Taiwanese government had spent almost TWD300 million on the construction of the facility, it is offering the use of the facility without fees to international researchers interested in using the facility for advancing their research, as long as they submit a proposal for use in advance.

All of the presenters who spoke of the abovementioned large-scale facilities were unanimous in calling upon ASEAN physicists to take advantage of these facilities. In making these facilities more accessible to resource-impoverished countries, one is taking important steps towards levelling the playing field, even as technologies emerging from the development of these instruments could be operationalised for less lofty yet important needs. Two examples of such technology transfer are the Proton Therapy Center at Singapore’s National Cancer Centre and the development of renewable energy resource, in the form of solar power, to build propulsion engines for space missions, as are presently ongoing at the NTU’s Plasma Sources and Application Centre.

Although the potential for experimental research at the frontier took up much of the workshop, time was set aside in the workshop programming to discuss some of the theoretical possibilities that could still unfold with continuing work done on recent discoveries at quantum and cosmic scales, from the process of validating high energy particles to further knowledge that could be derived from more extended studies into gravitational waves. The support given by governmental and other non-science stakeholders to pioneering work in physics also means that there will be increased opportunities for up-and-coming physicists, especially those from under-represented communities, to enter the field of fundamental physics research. ▪


36 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

Nanyang Quantum 2017: Workshop on Quantum Correlations and Resources Beyond EntanglementBy Prof Mile Gu School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, NTU

I n the 1980s, quantum information was barely a research field of its own. The few who studied it were

not focused on applications, but rather a theoretical curiosity of quantum theory known as “entanglement” that Einstein dubbed “spooky action at a distance”. Yet in just three decades, this curiosity is poised to permanently impact society, promising computers of unprecedented capability, and the ability to communicate with guaranteed security. Major companies and governments have jumped into the fray, with IBM’s “Q Experience”, China’s

quantum satellite and Microsoft's quantum programming language Q#. Nevertheless, developing practical quantum technologies remains an immense cha l lenge. Entanglement is fragile, disappearing at the first whiff of noise. Current laboratories thus exercise tremendous efforts to keep equipment in perfect isolation, fearful of the smallest imperfection.

But is entanglement the only resource that can empower quantum technology?


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 37

Researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) were among the first to explore this possibility. In 2011, Tomasz Paterek was one of the first to write the authoritative review on discord – a more robust quantum resource that can survive even where entanglement fails [Rev. Mod Phys. 84, 4 1655]. In 2012, Mile Gu spearheaded the first experimental demonstration that such resources can deliver quantum advantage [Nature Physics 8 671-675]. Since then, the field has continued to grow rapidly. A plethora of potential quantum resources have now been identified, each promising its own potential applications.

This presents an excellent opportunity for NTU to align itself as an international centre for related research. In this context, Gu and Paterek, together with Varun Narasimhachar, Suen Whei Yeap, Jayne Thompson, Leong Chuan Kwek proposed Nanyang Quantum 2017, a workshop to gather the research leaders of the field in Singapore. The idea gained enthusiastic support from both the Institute of Advanced Studies and the College

Prof Timothy Ralph, Node Director for CQC2T (The Australia Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology), giving a talk on distributed quantum coherence.

of Science. The resulting workshop took place at the Nanyang Executive Centre from 11 to 13 December 2017.

The event was a resounding success, attracting both research leaders across the globe and talented students in Singapore. The morning and early afternoon sessions featured stimulating talks, followed by the highlight of the workshop: the subsequent free discussions. Whiteboards dotted the atrium, providing ideal spaces to break cross-disciplinary barriers and forge new collaborations.

The discussions were exciting – from testing quantum effects in living systems, to advanced quantum heat engines – and Nanyang Quantum 2017 helped to place Singapore at the forefront of such explorations. For more information, see http://www.quantumcomplexity.org/nyquantum2017/ ▪

IAS NEWSLETTER | PUBLIC LECTURES

38 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

"Looking to the Frontiers of Fundamental Science" by Nobel Laureate Prof David GrossBy Ms Ng Li Ting, Janice Wee Kim Wee School Of Communication and Information, NTU and Mr Soh Swee Kai, Caleb School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, NTU

O ver the past 13 years, the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at Nanyang Technological

University (NTU), Singapore, has been actively organising events featuring the latest research trends to promote the sciences in the region. Occasionally, Nobel Laureates have been invited to give special public lectures to encourage interactions between students, young researchers and Nobel Laureates alike. Besides being a good opportunity for the younger generations to understand their field of study in layman terms, the public lectures serve as a source of inspiration to the audience.

Prof David Gross, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for uncovering asymptotic freedom, the nature of the interaction between quarks in atoms, delivered a lecture titled “Looking to the Frontiers of Fundamental Physics”. The lecture was held on 25 August 2017 at the Science Centre Singapore and was co-organised by IAS NTU and The Head Foundation, a Singapore-based think tank devoted to research and policy influence in education and leadership.

Prof Gross began by reflecting on how much of all that humanity has discovered and understood has come about only very recently, only in the last 50 years. His talk introduced the frontiers of fundamental physics with an emphasis on the standard model, a theory which systematically explains the structure and nature of matter and all fundamental forces (excluding gravity). By introducing the frontiers of this theory in light of its

According to Prof Gross, “The most important product of knowledge is ignorance.”

PUBLIC LECTURES | IAS NEWSLETTER

ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 39

history, Prof Gross noted the importance in becoming comfortable with ignorance, as it defines research. The talk then touched on the implications of man’s ability to understand the universe. It was underscored that understanding enables exquisite technological innovation, such as precision control over different phases of matter and at the nanoscale.

The talk highlighted however that the most important takeaway from scientific knowledge is not technological convenience. Rather, in apparently mystic-like fashion, ‘The most important product of knowledge is ignorance’.

Prof Gross was quick to clarify that science, in teaching people to focus on the questions that are amenable to observation, calculation or experiment, encourages respect for the limits of what can be meaningfully answered and thereby facilitates actual understanding. It is observation, calculation or experiment that distinguishes scientific ignorance and makes it informed ignorance.

Next, the lecture illustrated the fruitfulness of this research approach by considering how humanity today understands the universe’s beginnings. Because of these requirements, questions once left to opinion have evolved into questions that can be answered more reliably and with greater consensus. As an example of the lengths to which humanity must go to answer questions, Prof Gross pointed to present detectors sent out to space to listen to ancient gravitational waves that encode universal origins.

Prof Gross inspires optimism in his suggestion that the way of experiment, observation or calculation may be

extended even to such questions as whether there was a time before the Big Bang, or if the history of the universe is cyclic. Perhaps the limits of current scientific knowledge, for example about dark matter and dark energy, will fade with time. Will all questions one day be amenable to science?

Contrary to misconceptions that the scientific approach kills mystery or stifles creativity, Prof Gross explained that knowledge revealed by such methods is instead richer, more surprising and indeed more intriguing than conclusions arrived at by other means. An interesting example involved the nothing of space, which science has revealed is in fact far from nothing.

The talk also addressed the misconception that science must be complicated by considering the meaning of “complicated”. In one example, Prof Gross related how the fundamental forces that explain all interactions may be manifestations of just one force – if the funding for the higher energies required to demonstrate this can be found. Prof Gross also remarked that black holes of research may someday be explained by string theory when both relativity and quantum mechanics are unified to incorporate gravity into the standard model.

The talk concluded by returning to technological implications and musing on how quantum mechanics will define the future of computing, and on how much life may change when this comes to pass. In closing, Prof Gross reiterated that the frontier of physics research has great potential in the hands of tomorrow’s researchers. ▪

An enthusiastic discussion during the Q&A session with Prof Gross.

ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 39


40 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

"Dark Matter" by Nobel Laureate Prof Frank Wilczek and "How Our Universe Was Made" by Prof Carlos FrenkBy Clarissa Ai Ling Lee Jeffrey Sachs Center on Sustainable Development and Judy Yeo World Scientific Publishing Co Pte Ltd

T he public lecture, held in conjunction with the Topical Dark Matter workshop, saw the 2004

Nobel Laureate Prof Frank Wilczek outline the origins of dark matter, which has ushered in a new generation of frontier technology. Prof Wilczek began with the discovery of Neptune by French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier and British astronomer John Couch Adams, through the use of mathematical predictions rather than direct observation. He went on to credit Einstein’s general relativity and the geometry of electromagnetism provided by mathematician James Maxwell Clerk for their roles in the discovery of dark matter.

The Nobel Laureate gave a summary outline of all the major experiments in the world that are searching for dark matter candidates, such as the Weakly Interacting

Massive Particles (WIMPS) at the Chinese Jin-Ping Underground Laboratory, where the PandaX dark matter collaboration resides, and the ABRACADABRA (A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with an Amplifying B-field Ring Apparatus) experiment that has been proposed for the detection of axions. Before concluding his speech, Prof Wilczek revealed his vision of a near future where a gargantuan gravitational wave detector consisting of three platforms could be built and spoke of how the final confirmation of dark matter could spell a different kind of new physics.

Prof Wilczek’s lecture was followed by Prof Carlos Frenk’s (Durham University), talk titled “Everything from Nothing – How Our Universe Was Made". The Royal Astronomical Society ’s Gold Medallist, a theoretical cosmologist by training, demonstrated how

Nobel Laureate Prof Frank Wilczek speaking on Dark Matter.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 41

empirical data is still needed – however beautiful theoretical descriptions might be – by showing entrancing images of our known and lesser known aspects of the universe, all of which had been constructed from data points that astronomers had been able to collect through x-ray observatories, s a te l l i t e s and var ious r ad io telescopes.

Prof Frenk spent time discussing how dark matter could have been produced since the early days of the universe, especially since dark energy, which makes up more than 70% of the universe, could have contributed to the expansion of an accelerating universe. Dark energy, he explained, is now the target of investigation of a space mission led by a consortium of astrophysicists, particle physicists, cosmologists and other theoretical physicists, who also consider the problems of dark matter and gravity. Prof Frenk proceeded to discuss the important role of big data simulation, such as the EAGLE project, in being able to turn galactic signals (light and acoustics) that might have travelled from a far past before they were picked up by human-made instruments, which could then

The exhibition featuring the ongoing hunt for dark matter signatures was displayed at the Science Centre Singapore from 6 to 16 Nov 2017.

be used to map the evolution of the galaxies and other cosmic emissions, including that of the cosmic microwave background radiation considered as relics of the Big Bang.

The event lasted two hours, much to the delight of what was close to a full-house audience of nearly 500. Eager young students and adults took the opportunity to engage with the physicists during the question and answer session, prodding with penetrating questions the speculative nature of the science presented. ▪

The Q&A panel, chaired by Prof Phua (centre) saw Profs Frank Wilczek and Carlos Frenk replying to a myriad of questions from the audience.


42 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

Reflections on Prof Ngee-Pong Chang's Public Lecture: "Where is the Quantumin our Life?" By Tze Hng Loke Hwa Chong Institution, JC1 Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) Programme

W hen I first heard about the content of Prof Ngee-Pong Chang's (Senior Fellow, Institute of

Advanced Studies, NTU and City College of New York) public lecture on 24 August 2017 at Hwa Chong Institution, I was honestly stunned. Being a student with only an elementary exposure to classical physics, I was quite aware that quantum physics, which is seen by many students to be highly complex or even cryptic, would be quite difficult to understand. However, during the talk, I realised that my worries were quite unfounded as Prof Chang's explanations on the various phenomena in quantum physics were very relatable and easy to understand. I particularly liked Prof Chang's insightful analogies between raindrops and photons as it allowed me to visualise what photons were (something which I am always interested in), and helped me understand how quantum physics really featured in my daily life. Prof

Chang's animated gestures and humourous words during this segment were also particularly engaging and never failed to bring a smile to my face.

What really interested me were the human interest stories mentioned by Prof Chang, such as the struggle by the inventor of the blue LED, Shuji Nakamura, and the story about the scientist who created the Josephson junction, Brian David Josephson. In both stories, both men had to struggle really hard to materialise the concept that they had in their minds, and the key message that came across to me was to not be afraid to challenge convention and always persevere to the end. This is especially true in the domains of science as with rapid advancement, new theories are constantly being pushed out, rendering old ones obsolete, showing that there is no real "indisputable truth" in science.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 43

My favourite segment of the talk was the part about the Meissner effect and how it enables Maglev trains to levitate above the train tracks. The concept involving super conductors excluding magnetic fields and how induced super currents help to produce B-fields that help to levitate magnets really broadened my horizons, and I learnt that there was so much more to "simple" phenomena in our daily life and how seemingly abstract topics can have such varied applications to society.

I am really grateful for this opportunity to have a brief introduction to quantum physics by Prof Chang. His enthusiasm and passion for the subject was very infectious

as it set me thinking about the physics concepts mentioned and motivated me to delve deeper into the subject on my own. Prof Chang's talk was a really memorable experience that not only challenged my previous conceptions about physics, but also allowed me to recognise the large range of applications quantum science can have in daily life. With this, I would like to thank IAS NTU, Prof Chang, and my school for providing me with such a rare learning opportunity and I do hope that I can understand more about this topic in the future. ▪

Interest piqued, the students had many questions for Prof Chang during (and after) the Q&A session.


44 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

"Cosmic Questions in Physics"by Prof Ngee-Pong ChangBy Lim Yixin Anna and Le Nguyen Phuong Ha St Andrew’s Junior College

O n 22 August 2017, St Andrew’s Junior College (SAJC) was honoured to host Prof Ngee-Pong

Chang, an alumnus of the Saint Andrew’s School, for a talk on “Cosmic Questions in Physics”. The aim of this talk was to inspire students’ interest in physics through daily phenomenon and to encourage curiosity. The audience was mostly made up of our JC1 students in the Science Scholars Programme.

Prof Chang began his talk with an anecdote from the well-known physicist, Sir Isaac Newton. He shared with us the inspiring story of how Newton discovered gravity and his insights on the moon’s period when he was a student at Cambridge University. Through these, we learnt that age is not a prerequisite to great discoveries. He encouraged us to learn from Newton’s keen sense of observation, great innate curiosity about the logic found in the natural world, and his perseverance to pursue the answers to the problems that piqued his curiosity.

Next, he highlighted that great scientific discoveries arose when people were interested to answer questions, such as “Why is the sky dark at night?” and “How big is the universe?”. These questions may seem simple but the attempt to answer them well involves complex theories and equations. This approach to introducing astrophysics opened our minds to see that the learning of science is so connected to this universe that we live in.

Prof Chang also spoke about the Hubble Expansion, which is the foundation for the well-known Big Bang theory. He also introduced the famous Einstein field equations, which developed from his theory of relativity. Prof Chang made these theories and equations less daunting and more palatable through the use of engaging stories on how these theories and equations were discovered. Such an approach helped us see the possibilities of making new scientific discoveries, if only we are more observant and motivated to do a systematic investigation.

Towards the end of the talk, he discussed the problem of the cosmological constant. This demonstrated that the field of physics still has many unanswered questions awaiting curious minds to endeavour and provide theories to explain them.

It was certainly eye-opening and enriching to learn from an experienced physicist like Prof Chang. The insights that he shared in the area of astrophysics was truly captivating. As Prof Chang mentioned, his intention was to “create an interest of what is outside the box”. He inspires us to “keeps our eyes open and we will find a moment of Eureka”. Indeed, we shall strive towards this and we thank Prof Chang for his time in giving us an informative lecture. ▪

Prof Chang, an alumnus of Saint Andrew’s School, with his junior schoolmates.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 45

"Xiamen University Malaysia: The Pioneerof Chinese University Overseas Campus" by Prof Ruifang WangBy Jeremy Goh History, School of Humanities, NTU

T he Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Xiamen

University Alumni Association (Singapore), Federation of Chinese School Alumni Associations and Ee Hoe Hean Club (EHHC) co-organised a public lecture titled “Xiamen University Malaysia (XMUM): The Pioneer of Chinese University Overseas Campus” on 22 July 2017 at EEHC. The lecture was delivered in Chinese by Prof Ruifang Wang, President of XMUM. Around 250 people attended the talk.

According to Prof Guaning Su (President Emeritus, NTU) in his opening comments, the decision to appoint Prof Wang as XMUM’s President was indeed appropriate as he espoused the “Tan Kah Kee Spirit” – the strong dedication to education and commitment to create, and improve learning opportunities for students. Such spirit was reflected through Prof Wang’s leadership in setting up the Tan Kah Kee College in Xiamen University (XMU).

Prof Wang started his talk with an overview of XMU through three aspects. First, XMUM, fully owned by XMU, is the first overseas campus set up under Project 985, an initiative involving the allocation of large amounts of funding by the Chinese government towards the development of selected universities in China. Second, with the exception of Chinese Studies and Traditional Chinese Medicine, the medium of instruction for all programmes is English. Third, Prof Wang pointed out XMUM’s aim to become a full-fledged university offering a wide range of courses at Bachelor, Master and PhD levels.

The establishment of XMUM meets the needs of both Malaysia and China. According to Prof Wang, as part of

its aspiration to become a regional education hub, the Malaysian government formally invited XMU to set up an overseas campus in J a n u a r y 2 0 1 3 . I n particular, the presence of XMUM in Malaysia would facilitate the diversification of its p r i v a t e e d u c a t i o n sector. At the same time, the setting up of XMUM represents a form of historic reciprocation by “repaying” the philanthropic efforts of Mr Tan Kah Kee – an overseas Chinese entrepreneur based in the Straits Settlements – in sponsoring the formation of XMU in 1921. XMUM is poised to broaden and deepen the internationalisation of XMU, which currently partners 280 foreign universities and colleges for exchange and cooperation.

Prof Wang proceeded to introduce key statistical details of XMUM to the audience. Receiving a total investment of RMB 1.3 billion, it is slated to host 10,000 students upon the completion of construction. Currently, the university expects to take in 5,000 students by 2020, and would move on to subsequent phases of development – including the installation of additional amenities such as hostels and research facilities – once the number of enrolments surpasses 5,000. For the September 2017 intake, XMUM would offer a range of 12 undergraduate degree programmes in the fields of Information and Communication Technology, Humanities, Business, Engineering and Chinese. In particular, Prof Wang elaborated on XMUM’s Traditional Chinese Medicine

Prof Ruifang Wang (President, Xiamen University Malaysia) giving his talk at the Ee Hoe Hean Club.


46 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

(TCM) programme, which is popular among students in Malaysia. Besides undergraduate programmes, XMUM also offers one-year Foundation Programmes – a pre-university requirement for secondary school leavers with SPM, GCE ‘O’ Levels or other equivalent qualification – in Science, as well as Arts and Social Science. XMUM is also in the midst of preparing new degree programmes across Bachelor, Masters and PhD levels, which include International Relations, Actuarial Science, Energy Techno log y, Compute r S c i ence and Mar ine Biotechnology.

Prof Wang added that XMUM’s interdisciplinary programmes are an attraction by itself, as it promises to nurture interdisciplinary talents capable of meeting new challenges in a changing world. Students would be able to experience a rich campus culture and obtain access to quality education resources introduced from XMU, a renowned Chinese university with a long history of academic excellence. Additionally, graduates of XMUM can look forward to employment opportunities in Malaysia and China, since XMUM qualifications are recognised by both countries. With the perfect integration of Chinese elements and international education – taught in an English medium in a multicultural setting, XMUM’s students would have a competitive advantage as they participate in economic, cultural and technological exchanges between China and the Association of Southeast Asia (ASEAN) countries. As shared by Prof Wang, these attractions are manifested in the vision and mission of XMUM:

Vision: XMUM aspires to become a university with a distinct global outlook, featuring first-class teaching and research, and embracing cultural diversity.

Mission: To nurture young talents with dignity and wisdom, turning them into fine citizens of the region who will make contribution to the prosperity of the people and social progress of Malaysia, China and Southeast Asia.

XMUM’s vis ion and mission complement the conceptualisation and implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative, particularly the people-to-people connectivity aspect, which aims to establish a multi-tiered mechanism for cultural and people-to-people exchanges, building more cooperation platforms, and opening more cooperation channels. Given this context, educational cooperation, as a first move, would help foster a harmonious and friendly cultural environment by enhancing mutual understanding and trust among countries through cultural exchange and joint research between talents with a global outlook and cross-cultural communication skills.

However, the setting up and running of XMUM has its fair share of obstacles to cross. First, Prof Wang cited the problem of integrating both local and international members of the management team, owing to their different languages and standards. Another difficulty lies in the lack of teaching staff who are effectively bilingual in English and Chinese. Prof Wang also mentioned pressure caused by market and policy uncertainty in Malaysia. In particular, XMUM may experience a large deviation of enrolment numbers from its prediction due to a relatively smaller population and a larger number of universities around as compared to the Fujian Province. Illustrating this issue, Prof Wang stated that there are 100 universities offering undergraduate courses to a population of 31 million in Malaysia, as compared to approximately one-third of the former, to a population of 38 million in Fujian.

Prof Wang revealed that unstable educational policies towards tertiary education in Malaysia is another pertinent issue for XMUM. Concluding his talk, he discussed the challenges of managing a multicultural environment in XMUM, which may be complicated by adverse developments in international relations, the domestic political situation in Malaysia and ethnic issues. ▪

The campus of Xiamen University Malaysia.

SPECIAL ARTICLE | IAS NEWSLETTER

ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 47

A Tribute to Fields MedallistProf Vladimir VoevodskyBy Melissa Tay and Tan Si Qi Hwa Chong Institution

Prof Vladimir Voevodsky was a brilliant Russian-American mathematician who worked on the development of a homotopy theory for schemes, algebraic K-theory, the interrelations between algebraic geometry and algebraic topology and the formulation of motivic cohomology. On 30 September 2017, he passed away in Princeton, New Jersey, at age 51.

Prof Voevodsky was born to a family of scientists – his mother was a biologist and his father, a physicist. He failed to graduate from his high school and he flunked his examination at Moscow State University, yet he continued to read and collaborate with other mathematicians and publish papers. He eventually attracted the attention of mathematicians at Harvard University, who invited him to enroll there as a graduate student. He eventually received his PhD from Harvard in 1992.

In 2002, Prof Voevodsky was awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honour in mathematics, for solving the Milnor conjecture. The Milnor conjecture is a fundamental problem that had been deemed impossible to solve in the mathematics community until Prof Voevodsky's breakthrough.

Prof Voevodsky had contributed immensely to the research and education landscape in Singapore. We had the honour of hosting Prof Voevodsky four times, in 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2017, for the annual International Science Youth Forum (ISYF). During his second visit to Singapore in 2013, Prof Voevodsky took some time outside of his schedule to provide an insightful interview on his perspective in science and education. He expressed that his visits were often too short. He also jokingly quipped that he was there to entertain his audience, and that the true importance in the organisation of the ISYF lay in the opportunity that it provided for students from all parts of the world to interact on the same platform.

ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 47

IAS NEWSLETTER | SPECIAL ARTICLE

48 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

Have you always aspired to be a mathematician?Maybe from about the age of 16. Before that, I can’t remember what I aspired to be. But at 16 or 17, I decided that I wanted to be doing math. That was the first thing I wanted to be. I mean I wanted to be a mathematician and after that maybe become something else. But first, I wanted to be a mathematician.

We read that you are interested in biology and a lot of other things. So of all the things that interest you, what made you choose mathematics?Somehow for mathematics, it was mandatory to learn mathematics to understand everything else, to understand all the other subjects, especially physics.

How did your parents’ scientific background influence your work?I don’t know. It helps that I know some chemistry and physics, so when I read any news about science or something like that, I can follow comfortably. So in that sense, they have influenced me. But talk about my work in mathematics, then I don’t know.

Have your parents’ work ethic influenced the way you do mathematics?I don’t think so. Obviously, my parents influenced just about everything I do, but how that influenced my work, I don’t know.

What helps you achieve a breakthrough when you’re stuck at a problem?Well, there are all the usual things, but other than the usual things, there is something that is rather peculiar, I don’t know why it works. But suppose you are stuck at something, trying to understand something, and it doesn’t work. What often helps me is to think about other things, like something unrelated to mathematics, like all the other things that you have to do, but you haven’t done yet, and you’re kind of putting them aside to do a lot of work in mathematics, so you have a backlog of these things. So

sometimes, it helps me to look at this backlog, to do some of the things in the backlog, and then I get a breakthrough in mathematics. It definitely does help.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of your research?I don’t really know how to start, because different things are rewarding in different ways. For example, you cannot really compare good food to mathematical discoveries, both have their rewarding qualities, but you cannot really say they are the same. Suppose you make very small mathematical discoveries, which give you some kind of qualitative reward, and you eat some good food, which can also give you another kind of qualitative reward. How can you compare both? The achievement of some awards, or holding some high post in mathematics would also be another kind of reward. Besides that, getting paid for mathematics is also rewarding. Getting mathematical prizes or being appreciated for your work is also rewarding. I think both of the things must be present in order to qualify as a reward; both internally from achieving some progress in what you want to do, and from the external, like appreciation and respect. Both things should be there.

What motivates you to continue doing mathematics, even when you are stuck?In many cases, what motivates you is not having any better choice. What is the alternative? To just give up and go away in seclusion and say that “I don’t want to think about the world anymore”? That is not a very good approach. Perseverance comes from the absence of alternatives.

What do you think are important factors that pushed you to excel in mathematics?I think one factor was that I was talented. I felt that I can understand complicated mathematics very well, and I enjoyed mathematics, so that was a factor. Another fact was that I lived in the Soviet Union when I was beginning

How Mathematics lay the foundation for Scientific Education: An Interview with Prof Voevodsky


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 49

in mathematics and we had very interesting and good mathematical schools there. There were many cool people doing mathematics, so it was really somewhat attractive to try to become like them in some ways. And I think to a certain extent, the school education was quite good in some sense. It was not perfect, but I think maybe it suited me.

Can you name some of the cool people who are doing mathematics?A lot of them were cool in different ways. Like Shafarevich for example, he is a rather cool person. Manin is a cool person. Fedor Bogomolov is a cool person in a different way. A lot of them were cool, and mathematics was one field that was not controlled by the government; it is kind of tricky to introduce ideology into mathematics. Mathematics is either true or not true, and it is kind of dumb to ban mathematics. It was one of the few fields which was unaffected by ideology, so that was probably why a lot of cool people went into mathematics.

You mentioned that the mathematics education at that time was quite good. Could you elaborate on that and explain what a good education is in mathematics?I have to be a little more precise here. It was good for me. The Soviet Union, at that time, had a fixed curriculum, which all the schools in the country had to follow. There was only one set of textbooks, one curriculum for a huge

country of 250 million, and for other people, it was not such a good thing. The curriculum was rather stringent. There was a lot of mathematics in the curriculum and many people could not understand it. But for those who could, it was a good education.

At that time, the Moscow University was also a very good university for mathematics. The mathematics department of Moscow University was one of the top places in the world for an education in mathematics, definitely in the top ten, and maybe even in the top three or four.

Many students find that mathematics may have no direct applications in their daily lives. What do you think about that?First, that is true, but one day, it may be needed in scientific work. You need mathematics if you want to go into science. It is just as ancient history has no direct application in daily life, but no one knows what one may need in the future years of one’s life. The things you need now may be very different from the things that you will need 20 years later. When they get the school’s systemic education, they will learn a little bit from different subjects, from all areas of human knowledge. It is an early period in life. Some people educate themselves further, but not many do so because then we get busy in this grownup world. There are so many things to take care of that people don’t have enough energy or motivation to learn. So this thing which you learn here is going to prepare you for nobody knows what, in the future. I guess

Prof Voevodsky (centre) with the student delegates at the Nobel Forum on 23 January 2013, Hwa Chong Institution.

IAS NEWSLETTER | SPECIAL ARTICLE

50 | ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018

experience has shown that it does make sense to teach kids mathematics, even though they don’t need it. And it makes sense to teach children history, even though they don’t need it.

Do you have any words of encouragement for students who want to take mathematics for their further studies?It depends on the student, but I can say that mathematics is definitely going to develop a lot in this century at least. I think there are very interesting changes that are going to occur in the next 50 years. It is a very active area and there are still some cool people in it. It is a very healthy subject actually, looking from different perspectives. I sort of predicted that mathematics would get into trouble about this time; I gave an interview maybe 10 years ago when I said that mathematics would likely to be in some sort of crisis. Now, I don’t feel that mathematics is any different from 10 years ago, and it is still in a healthy state.

Why did you think that mathematics would be in a state of crisis?Well, I don’t think so any more actually. One of the reasons is because of the things I am working on now, which is a real breakthrough and will help keep mathematics going in the years to come. Even now, mathematics is not in a beautiful shape because it is a little sub-divided into clusters or fields that do not interact with each other much. People from one cluster do not understand people from another cluster. But it is healthy enough to get it through the current period. I am more optimistic now.

Could you share more about the research that you have done, or are doing?It is kind of tricky to explain it in an interview. What I am doing right now is working to create a language that can be used both by humans and by the computer, which can be used to do reasoning in Pure Mathematics. Humans can use this language to write mathematics and the computer can verify what they have written. In fact, in more practical terms, this turns out to be an interactive thing. One can actually deal with proof using the interaction with the computer. I think this will be very important.

So you mentioned that you have been to Singapore once before, what’s your impression of Singapore? Or was your stay too short?It was too short. But I did look at all the posters yesterday. One of the impressions that I got was that some posters were very advanced, while others were more elementary. There is a really big variation between the kinds of thing which people do, which boils down to the resources schools have to support the project.

Do you have any impression of the participants at the ISYF?They were rather shy to ask questions. I gave one lecture, but during the question and answer session, they were not very active.

What do you like to do in your free time?I mostly read. There isn’t much to do in Princeton and there isn’t anywhere to go. Sometimes, I go to the movies. I mostly read and sometimes I cook for myself, or I go and walk in the woods. But that’s about all what one can do in Princeton.

What books do you like to read?I like to read a lot of non-fiction and fantasy; history, different books of journalists documenting recent events.

You mentioned you like to read science fiction. Is it because you like to analyse the theories and plots?No, I don’t like to analyse the technologies, I try not to. It’s just more fun to read science fiction than books about real life.

Would you want to make the transition from research to teaching?No, I have a lot of plans for research that I want to see to completion. Maybe I will give lectures about it, but not to teach for now.

What do you think is the value of a science education, as compared to an arts education?I think both are important. I also feel that people from the humanities should hang out with the science people more and vice versa.


ISSUE 22 • APRIL 2018 | 51

them, I learned about work and how to organise my work and life.

Do you think there is any important quality that a mathematician should have to succeed in doing research?He should really persevere.

Do you dedicate your whole time to research?Well, sometimes. I have different periods. Some periods I can do absolutely no mathematics. There was a year actually, from 2006 to 2007. There are periods when I just have to wait. I try to learn something else or I become social and start going to parties. During that time, I didn’t miss doing mathematics. I was totally immersed in other things.

Would you be thinking of going back to Russia for work?If they can pay me better than in America, then probably.

Besides being paid, there is also the issue of its healthcare system which I don’t trust all that much in Russia. Actually, I don’t trust it at all. I probably won’t be bringing my family to Russia. My kids are in America and it will be difficult to get them to move to Russia.

How is the current education system in Russia different from the past, communist Russia?I don’t really know. But what I observed is that we don’t have a state curriculum anymore. Now, there are private schools and public schools, but I don’t know the details of the system. My older daughter goes to high school in Boston, in Cambridge actually. I think they do reasonable math. I haven’t been very concerned about it, honestly. From my point of view, it is not so much whether the schools will teach them what I think is important, or what was important in my time. I think what is important is whether these schools can prepare them well for the lives they will lead. Presumably if they will be living in America so they need to be prepared for life in America in the 21st century. Does that require rigorous proofs in mathematical analysis? Probably not for the majority of people. So I think that schools have to be pretty good in preparing students for what they have to deal with. ▪

What do you think of the event as a whole?I think that it is a very interesting idea. I think what is important is not the interaction between students and professors, but the interactions of students from different schools and countries. I think this should be very useful. We are here to keep you entertained. The real thing happens between students.

Do you think that mathematics and science are research areas requiring much cooperation?Mathematicians do their work individually for the most part, but they also interact a lot in different countries and places. We visit each other. We both interact and work individually. I mean, we exchange emails and ask questions.

When I am doing some work in mathematics, I may not be a specialist in certain areas, so if I encounter some problem related to these areas, I need to know who I can ask. It is important to keep a circle of people you know and be aware of their respective areas of expertise. We interact a lot and sometimes we cooperate. Interaction is very important in conferences and workshops.

Is there any particular person who has inspired you? Not only in your field of study, but also in your values?Well, all my teachers in mathematics were also my teachers in life. Every one of them was like that. From

Prof Voevodsky speaking to students at the ISYF masterclass.

CONNECT WITH USntu.edu.sg/ias

facebook.com/iasntusg

linkedin.com/company/iasntu

institute of advanced studies€¦ · institute of advanced studies, singapore nanyang...

Documents