Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…I would say the South. I think most westerners’ perception of India is based on North India: Taj Mahal, Delhi, Agra, so forth. But going to places in Tamil Nadu, going to places in Karnataka, increasingly . . . If you think about Silicon Valley, the corresponding place in India is in Hyderabad and the tech sector there. If I were to pick a specific place, the area where I’m from, there’s a city called Madurai in Tamil Nadu, which is a typical Tamilian city, and you get a very different feel for what India is relative to what you’d see in Delhi. What is striking is that India is really a combination of many different countries, but completely distinct languages, completely different food, culture, and customs, and so forth. So what I would suggest is visiting at least two or three different states so you can see the diversity in the country. Chennai is actually my favorite Indian city, it may please you to know. So I agree with that. As you probably know, in the history of South India, there’s this long-standing tradition of mathematical prodigies. Your work isn’t exactly mathematical, but broadly speaking, of course, it is. And why is it you think there’s this connection between South India and this history of mathematical prodigies? Do you have any thoughts on that? Is it something about the abstract nature of the philosophical thinking embedded into South Indian Hinduism? Yes, it could be. The name that comes to mind most prominently is Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity . And I think that type of thinking is encouraged once you have a tradition of people in that vein. I remember hearing a lot about Ramanujan since I was a little kid. And so you look up to that kind of thing, and maybe that influences subsequent generations of children as well. I think that kind of mechanism is actually extremely important in terms of what children choose to do.…

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