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Dilip Dsouza

Dilip Dsouza

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Searching for an invisible Ninth

Some things in our lives are givens. We grow up with them firmly embedded in our brains and consciousness, not questioned to any degree. The shapes of...

08.03.2024 4

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Dilip Dsouza

The finite that hints at the infinite

On my college campus again after several years, I’m consumed—as you can imagine—with nostalgia. Memories at this corner, that hostel looks so...

29.02.2024 4

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Dilip Dsouza

Journey to the certainty of death

Somewhere right in the middle, you’d be weightless. Might feel kind of funky. But certainly privileged too: after all, how many of us get to...

25.01.2024 10

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Dilip Dsouza

When signals in space get a response

What happens in outer space is a never-ending source of mystery and wonder. Black holes, pulsars, anyone? Cepheid variables, globular clusters,...

18.01.2024 3

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Dilip Dsouza

2024: Year of the tetrahedrals and triangles

Meme that’s making the rounds this week: This New Year, 2024, is tetrahedral. What does that mean? No, it has nothing to do with those containers...

04.01.2024 4

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Dilip Dsouza

How magicians control flip of a coin

Before writing this, I divided 350,757 by 48. The result? Just over 7,307. Which means 48 people each tossed a coin 7307 times. Give that some...

28.12.2023 7

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Dilip Dsouza

Bees understand zero means nothing

Every time I meet my good friend Ajay, he is bubbling with fascinating ideas and nuggets. Most recently, he told me of a visit to Chichén Itzá, the...

21.12.2023 3

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Dilip Dsouza

The 20th is 22 septillion plus

What is it about sequences and mathematicians, really? You’d be hard-pressed to find a number theorist who isn’t fascinated by sequences of...

14.12.2023 6

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Dilip Dsouza

The moment when you add pi

There’s a meme making the rounds, an image of a bill somebody paid at a restaurant. The bill is for $26.86. In the space marked “TIP", the...

07.12.2023 5

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Dilip Dsouza

The 41 men stuck in the tunnel

As I write this, 41 of my fellow-citizens have spent 12 days trapped inside a collapsed tunnel in Uttarakhand. My hope is that by the time you read...

23.11.2023 3

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Dilip Dsouza

Less than four at one blow

The mind is unable," wrote W. Stanley Jevons, “to estimate any large number of objects without counting them successively." He was right. Think, for...

16.11.2023 10

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Dilip Dsouza

The comet exploded, or it didn?t

Something I’ve always wanted to do with this column is to explore a little bit of how science progresses. Not the details of experiments conducted...

09.11.2023 7

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Dilip Dsouza

To migrate or not to migrate

There’s something compelling about bird migration. The way birds return to the same spot year after year, the distances they travel, how relatively...

12.10.2023 5

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Dilip Dsouza

Twist in the tale of the Möbius strip

NEW DELHI : Remember your first Möbius strip? I don’t. But I remember, every time I made one, a sense of wonder at what was about to happen. A...

05.10.2023 6

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Dilip Dsouza

Cosmic curio: A little bit of Bennu

NEW DELHI : Half a century ago, astronauts brought back a total of a few hundred kilograms of rocks from the moon. It generated great excitement,...

28.09.2023 6

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Dilip Dsouza

Wither, scientific temperament?

Every so often, there’s news that makes me despair that we will ever build a scientific temperament in this country. This column is about some such...

22.09.2023 3

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Dilip Dsouza

Students watch an orbit shorten

The spacecraft slammed into the asteroid. We got spectacular photos of the crash and the aftermath. Later observations showed that the crash had...

14.09.2023 7

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Dilip Dsouza

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