THE KVPY SCHOLARS

[Click on the Photo to Enlarge]

As far as i remember the people in the photo are:

Bottom Line (L-R): Rasagy "RaSh/Gr81", Debasish, Priyanka, Abhinav Uppal, Mr. S Mallick (our cordinator of the camp), Another Coordinator, Debanjan "ObiWanKenoby", BhagyaShree, Sunita, Prateeti, Somani (Standing behind).
2nd Line: Sandeepan Parekh "Spidy" (2nd from Left) & Saurya Prakash "Time" (Blue Shirt, behind Debanjan)

3rd Line:Swetabh "Bhakt" (Behind Twish), Twishmay "Twish/Twister" (Red & White) ..... Lagnajeet (Yellow), Manish (Blue), Pravar D Mahajan, Ankit "Pandey" (Black).

Last line: Abhishek Bhatnagar (Red Shirt), Ankit sagwal (Orange Shirt), Tanmay and Ashish.

PS: Isnt that Arpit on extreme Top Right?

Any one else whom u can identify, plz comment....

(Updated last on 17/4/7 by Gr81)

Intro

Thats me, Dhrubajyoti Samanta a.k.a. DJ. Sorry for this late intro. Just couldn,t think of anything to write. I had joined the summer camp at Calcutta with all the others. I had also played football with others. So long for now. Waiting for your comments.

Introducing...

Hello, people.

I am not one of the "bright students of India getting the KVPY Scholarship". Nope. I'm just here for the absurdity of it all.

So let me introduce myself. I am Rohit Garg. Also called RG.
First off, I'm sort of obsessed with light and invisibility (and spinvisibility). Also studying the possibilities of time travel.

I also like blood as a colloid buffer. I am partially insane, but I believe you geniuses (or genii) can put up with that.

Also love computers.

latest intro

My pic!

The first hi-mates. I know I am the last un, but cant help with being in skool can I?So here is my intro.
Name: debanjan basu
Nick: my classmates call me basu (with that inimitable undertone of contempt-u know the sort)- n I am fine with that.
Identification: Kept me thinking actually coz I did not do anything special(read stupid) over there but the pic may help. Oh yes......I am from Ramakrishna mission vidyapith, deoghar .that'll do, wont it?
So that's all , as twish correctly pointed out, we shall all get together nxt summer.

hello

Hi guys. This is Ankit
I guess i am a little late in joining.

It's the IISc kid

Hey,
I saw somebody ask for my intro, so I'll start off with that. My name is Arun Tejasvi Chaganty (call me arun), and I'm studying in 12th (along with most guys here i think), in FIITJEE (curses, lighting and gasps). Very very luckily, this place isn't as coaching centre-ish as i feared it would be, and I still have time for my on stuff (more like i don't really care for their work (not after the summer camp atleast)). As you would have seen, I like nested brackets a lot, so I'm sorry if that causes inconvinience to any one. I joined KVPY this very year, and along with most of the people down south (I'm located in Hyderabad), we got to go to the IISC campus.

I think this part is what more people are interested in, so I'll elaborate quite a bit. All the SP, SB and south-zone SA students had their centre in IISc. Please pardon me to mention that IISc is THE most prestigious campus in India (I don't think anyone can object here), and basically I'd like to rub that in your face. The only way you'll be able to counter is if you post a review of the campus where you went (This is an elaborate ploy to get you to do the same).

Ok the fact that there were students of varying graduation levels was good in a sense, and bad too. In most of the labs we visited, the explanations were never very satisfying for both of us at the same time. On the other hand, these guys are really great guys to interact with (not all of them, but a lot of them). A large number were from the IIT's and BITS.

I'll kind of give an overview of what we did. We mainly attended a lot of great (and a few not so great) lectures by great professors. These lectures were mainly on common ground, topics that were entirely out of stream so that both the SA and the SB+SP guys could understand whats going on. I'll give a list later. Then we had a lot of lab visits. We saw a lot, but I can't say we did too much. It was interesting, and exciting at times, but it's rather inconvinient when you have like 20 people stuffed into a small room with a lot of expensive equipment (You won't believe how seemingly disorganised some of the breakthrough research labs are). That was pretty much it. We were allowed to roam around the campus at our free will, and visit the library (heaven on earth).

The campus was just beautiful. Perhaps it was the real heaven, and the library was just a teaser. Either way, there were a lot of trees, and a lot of crows, and a lot of white patches on the roads (I hope you can put 2 and 2 together). The wild life and greener there made it a great place for the ecologists there, who were doing some really interesting experiments with social bug behaviour. A group also actively worked in a nearby (or not so nearby I haven't a clue), national park monitoring elephant populations and battling poaching. There was a huge library, a lot of departments and a supercomputing research lab (obviously the low of our lab visits. They can't show you much more than a LOT of computer terminals), an NMR research centre, a nano-research lab, and a cryogenics facilities. THe other high end equipment was in the departments. A bunch of spectrometers, sputtering devices, atomic force microscopes, electron microscopes, blah blah blah (the average guy would be watering by about now, but I'm sure youa'll have see this stuff too).

We were also taken to the Raman Research Institute, which is another amazing place. The most remarkable thing there was the laser-cooling lab, where they slow down electrons to nanoK temperatures. I'd suggest you read this stuff up.
As I said I'll list most of the lectures (everything I can recall):

Evolution of Social Behaviour: Do we form social groups just to ensure our genetic make up goes on? This professor (Prof. Nanjudaih V) was just brilliant, and mentioned quite somethings about chaos theory also.

The Many Forms of Carbon: As you guessed, it was lame lecture. The plus point was that the lecturer presented a new form of carbon which was researched in the campus: Super Carbon: an conducting amorphous form of carbon. It was interesting in how it was made using logical assumptions (better than fullerene which was a fluke)

Protiens and how the Work: A great lecture, though highly technical about how protiens are made.

Chemisty in Life: About how molecules work in life (to a lesser degree). It wasn't a very enlightening lecture, but the lecturer:Prof. Uday Maitra, was just mindblowingly good, so I guess we all fell in love with him, rather than what he was teaching

***Black Holes: This was undoubtedly the BEST lecture I've EVER EVER had (which isn't many, but still) by a professor from the Raman Research Institute, Prof. Srinivasan G. It explained in a very good technical manner about black holes. Great lecture again

Variations from the DNA Helix: A good lecture, but perhaps not great

Colours In Chemistry: Interesting demonstrations showing different reactions producing flourescent colours, interesting colours blah blah.

Virtual Experiments: Again by Prof. Uday Maitra. He showed a number of experiments performed somewhere else recorded on "tape" (nobody uses tape anymore). He did a good walkthrough through all the experiements. Again most amazing professor I've seen.

There were four more lectures which I missed because of a 103 degree fever (weeping hesterically). I wish I could have attended them, but bad luck I guess. I'll just have to pray that somebody posts a good explaination of these lectures. (they were the last four lectures).

Now if you haven't gotten sick of me, and the length of my post, I'll continue, but as I know that's not the case. Beam me up scotty (Star Trek anyone?)

Arun

I HaVe ThE POWER!!

Well, does the title remind you of the classic “He-Man” Cartoon series?? Well I’m not posting about cartoons but this has to do with “Power.” But that’ll come later.

First of all, I wanted to post my intro too but was waiting for Twish to mail me the pics from the camp. So that’s me saying: ”I have the Power!!”. You want a formal Intro? Here you go:

Name: Rasagy Sharma (a.k.a. ‘Rash’ The Gr81)

Residing in: Delhi

Interests: Dramatics (Done loads of TV and Radio Shows), PlayingSoccer (Some of you who played with me know that – It’s a second religion for me!), of course anything to do with Computers (I just luv Computers!) and last but not the least, making Friends (and continuing the friendship too!)

Enough about me. So after reading Bravura’s post, I was sitting in front of my computer wondering about what went wrong there. Got some ideas, but couldn’t join them all up. And then a short chat with Twish only raised my ideas to higher powers… Yes. It was powers about which I have been thinking all night. Well, most of such weird looking problems arise from the fact that what we have been taught about powers, multiplication etc. is too basic (coz we were too young to understand complex nos. at that time). And even now, we haven’t updated our information about such elementary things, though we do know complex nos. etc. And thus arise such ques.

Well here are some examples:

1. 1⁰ = 2⁰

Then won’t 1 = 2 ?? (Say we have 2^x=2², then we say that x = 2, don’t we??!!)

2. To prove: 3 = 4
Proof:
Let a+b = c
4a-3a + 4b-3b = 4c-3c
:.4a+4b-4c=3a+3b-3c
:. 4*(a+b-c)=3*(a+b-c)
:. 3 = 4

Maybe most of you can find what’s wrong up there (I think you all Should find that out easily!). But ever wondered why even your computer’s scientific calculator can’t compute (-8)^1/3 ? Even though the answer is an obvious -2 ? (It says invalid input for the function: Got some clue??). Though its fine that it can't compute (-8)^1/2.

Another nice problem (which Twish told me during the camp) is the following:

We know that

4*4 = 4 + 4 + 4 + 4

:. 4*4= 4 + 4 +… 4 times.

:. x*x = x + x + … x times.

Differentiating,

2*x = 1 + 1 + 1 … x times.

:. 2*x = x

Hence 2 = 1!!!

All such problems arise because we forget our assumptions – the definitions of the functions – the domains of the functions and we tend to generalize a formula we learnt in junior classes here.

Now what I was thinking was this:

x = 1^1/3

Then x³ = 1. And we get the solutions for x. So as this n increases, the no. of solutions for x also increase (which is n itself).

But if n-> infinity , we get only one value for x = 1. (Actually here we can’t replace n by infinity as n-> infinity but n is not equal to infinity.)

Also,

2 ⁰ = 1
1 ⁰ = 1
0 ⁰ = ?

Well infact 0 ⁰ an indeterminate form. So we can treat it as an exception.

But what if n is a complex no.?? According to Twish, it’ll lead to infinite solutions for x. I reckon that’s what messes everything in Bravura’s problem. So can some body explain to me what’ll happen with complex powers? (Do we have any physical interpretation other than just saying Z = 2 ⁱ finding Z??)

Sorry for writing such a Llllllooooonnnngggg post, but I think it'll compensate for my absence in the coming few days when I'll go out of station. So I hope to find many posts by then (posts by members other than Twish's Dead Ends - come on others plz post!)

And before ending, a bit of cheerleading… (yeah I’m at least good at that!) U ppl are doing a gr8 job posting stuff, but do visit the blog regularly (Too busy studying huh?) And do give more ideas as to what more to add in the blog..

So SwItCh On YoUr FuSeD BuLbS!!

~RashTheGr81~

This is Somani

Hi ,
This is Somani,
Call me by any other nickname you please(just inform me about it )
For identification 'The girl whose hair stood up due to shock' should be enough.

I AM

Hi Every1
I'm Sunita Panda from IIT Kharagpur campus
u might remember me as
-the girl who used to ask stupid questions during lectures.
-the self appointed guide at the science city (till my job was outsourced to 2 strangers)
I think that should be enough

Thatz me !!!

Hey blogmates !

Herez my info:

• Name : Twishmay Shankar
• Nickname: Twish, Twister, Twist etc.
• Played soccer(my team against rash's team), asked lotz of questions during the debate, used to sing really bad along with Ankit! & maybe you'll remember my monster laughter !!!

Thatz enough about me, now about this blog, we are shortly going to have a shoutbox (a small window like thing where you can post messages) here. It would then be a request to all to post all their relevant messages to that box. The comments posted should be relevant to the post itself. However, till we don't get a shoutbox, you all can converse through the comments section of the very first post of this blog.

May us KVPYians RULE !!!

~ Twish ~

PS : Who introduced this KVPYians term ? It sounds a little funny! Any1 with any better ideas ???