Here’s one for the math books.

A Filipino has won the Paul Erdos Award for 2006, an honor bestowed by the World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions. Read more

A year or two before I graduated from college, I found out during registration that my school was offering a new course, BS Mathematics. I thought it was a great development, having enjoyed many an algebra class in school. Math wasn’t something I was interested in majoring in (and even if it were, it was too late to shift), but I always thought that this world already had too many movie starlets and too few mathematicians, so if my school was planning on churning out one or two math graduates, it could only be a good thing.

Unfortunately, once registration period was over, it turned out that no one had enrolled for the course. It was sad, really, and I suspect two reasons why: (1) In a country where your surest bet for a good future was to be a nurse and go abroad, a degree in Math is hardly a ticket to fame and/or fortune; and (2) People were just scared shitless of the guy who was going to head the department.

This guy — let’s call him Prof. Moriarty — was brilliant, smoked a lot, and was one of the few people that made being inside a classroom fun. These days I don’t remember a lot of the stuff I learned in integral calculus, but I do remember how much I looked forward to them. Not because I did really well in them (I didn’t), but because they were the few times in my life where everything made sense. Anyone who’d been dumped by an ex, led on by a crush, lied to by her friends or screwed by her boss would appreciate those few moments in her existence where the universe is not a howling wilderness of undeserved pain populated by morons who seem to have hoarded all the chocolate and good shoes.
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