University Of Cambridge Alumni

"We should, in other words, seriously consider the possibility that the new religious and cultural synthesis, represented by the Rigveda was essentially a product of the soil of India and Pakistan, and that it was not imported, ready-made, on the back of the steeds of the Indo-Aryans. Of course, it evolved while in contact with the developing cultures of other lands, most notably Iran, so that by a process of peer polity interaction, cultures and ideologies emerged which in many ways resembled each other. It is not necessary to suggest that one was borrowed, as it were, directly from the other."

"There are, in particular, some suggestions that the religion practised in the Indus valley may have had its effect on the later Hindu religion. The 'great bath' at Mohenjo-daro may well have had ritual purposes,' which reminds us today of the various Hindu ceremonies of purification. Among the few major stone objects from the Indus valley sites are shaped stones, which many observers have pointed out may hold a phallic significance,4 but they also resemble quite closely the lingam, the sacred stone dedicated to the Lord Shiva in modem Hindu practice. There arc other indications, for instance the seated figure, in yoga po&tion, seen on an Indus valley sealstone· has been equated by some with representations of the Lord Shiva himself. Of course, continuity of cult need not indicate continuity of language, but there is no inherent reason why the people of the Indus valley Civilization should not already have been speaking an Indo-European language, the ancestor of the Rigveda."

"Despite Wheeler's comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization, which on this hypothesis would be speaking the Indo-European ancestor of Vedic Sanskrit. Certainly there are elements of continuity from the Indus Civilization onto its aftermath. The main disruption was the ending of urban life, but as Raymond Allchin has emphasized, the rural life of northern India, and what is now Pakistan, carried on little changed."

"In this way it might be argued that, from the very earliest farming times, as represented by Mehrgarh and by other sites later, an early; lndo-European language was spoken in the Indus valley and in areas to the north and west."

"Certainly the assumption that the Aryas were recent ‘immigrants’ to India, and their enemies were ‘aborigines’, has done much to distort our understanding of the archaeology of India and Pakistan."

"This hypothesis that early Indo-European languages were spoken in north India with Pakistan and on the Iranian plateau at the sixth millennium BC has the merit of harmonizing symmetrically with the theory for the origin of the Indo-European languages in Europe. It also emphasizes the continuity in the Indus Valley and adjacent areas from the early neolithic through to the floruit of the Indus Valley civilization."

"It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization."

"As far as I can see there is nothing in the Hymns of the Rig Veda which demonstrates that the Vedic-speaking population were intrusive to the area: this comes rather from a historical assumption of the "coming of the Indo-Europeans." .. Nothing implies that the Aryans were strangers there."

"This area [east Macedonia], although firmly now part of Greece, has sometimes been a marginal one, and may at times have owed allegiance in different directions through a process of boundary displacement. It was indeed occupied in early classical times by Thracian tribes, barbarians who did not speak the Greek language. No doubt they did indeed speak a Thracian language akin to that in what is now Bulgaria, whose origins were suggested earlier."

"When Wheeler speaks of “the Aryan invasion of the Land of the Seven Rivers, the Punjab,” he has no warranty at all, so far as I can see. If one checks the dozen references in the Rig Veda to the seven rivers, there is nothing in any of them that to me implies an invasion. . . . Despite Wheeler’s comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley."

"In the Indo-European field, linguists have been willing to follow the archaeological orthodoxy of nearly a century ago, while archaeologists have taken the conclusions of the historical linguists at their face value, failing to realize that they were themselves based upon archaeological assumptions which had not been questioned, yet which were not, in some cases, justifiable."

"“[This] episode of elite dominance which brought the indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family to India (…) may have been as early as the floruit of the Indus civilization (…)”"

"The book encapsulating it was Centuries of Darkness in 1991. The authors were not fringe mavericks. Colin Renfrew, Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University wrote in the book’s Forword, ‘They [the authors]indicate that the chronology for the time period in question, the so called “Third Intermediate Period”, is altogether shaky. They show that there are problems with the historical chronology of the Near East. And the sad fact is that the historical chronology for the rest of the Mediterranean until well after 700 BC rests on these. It is already widely known that the chronology for early Italy, during the Iron Age period, down to and including the foundation of Rome, is a complete shambles.’ He concluded, ‘I feel their critical analysis is right and that a chronological revolution is on the way.’"

"As Renfrew put it in his archly-titled review of Mallory’s book – ‘They ride horses, don’t they?’ – the horse has assumed “an almost mythical significance in traditional Indo-European studies” (1989: 845)."

"The significance of the horse for the understanding of the distribution of early Indo-European has been much exaggerated."

"Why, beyond reasons of scientific curiosity, do we want to know about the past? And whose past is it anyway? …the past is big business…the past is politically highly charged, ideologically powerful and significant."

"Many linguists have commented that these proposed dates of separation are 'too early,' but how . . . do they know this, or judge this?"

"The linguistic designation of a category of “Indo-European/Aryan” languages is not the question here. However, the historical, and prevailing, use of the language designation is the issue. For two centuries, scholars concentrating on the South Asian data have described an Indo-European/Aryan migration/invasion into South Asia to explain the formation of Indian civilization. The conflating of language, people/culture, “race” to maintain the “myth of the Aryan invasion” continues, perhaps, as Leach so cogently notes, due to the academic prestige at stake. The distinguished scholar Colin Renfrew (1987) opts to distort the archaeological record rather than to challenge it. Failing to identify archaeological evidence for such a migration in the European post-Neolithic periods, Renfrew argues instead for an Indo-European/Aryan human migration associated with the spread of food production economies from Anatolia. In doing so, he ignores critical archaeological data from Southwest Asia and South Asia. The South Asian archaeological data reviewed here does not support Renfrew’s position nor any version of the migration/invasion hypothesis describing western population movement into South Asia. Rather, the physical distribution of prehistoric sites and artifacts, stratigraphic data, radio- metric dates, and geological data describing the prehistoric/proto-historic environment perhaps can account, in some degree, for the Vedic oral tradition describing a cultural discontinuity of what was an indigenous population movement in the Indo-Gangetic region."

"[Supporters of Renfrew’s theory] “have tried to render the Indo-Iranian problem moot. They argue that the Indo-Iranian branch was somehow divided from the main body of Proto-Indo-European before the colonists brought agriculture to the Balkans. Greek and Indic are thus separated by millenniums of linguistic change - despite the close grammatical correspondences between them (... these correspondences probably represent shared innovations from the last stage of PIE).”"

"“All the migrations postulated by Renfrew ultimately stem from a single catalyst: the crossing of Anatolian farmers into Greece… For all practical purposes, Renfrew’s hypothesis disregards Tocharian and Indo-Iranian.”"

"Long before we run out of oil, coal and gas, we will have to stop extracting them from the ground and burning them, if dangerous climate change is to be averted."

"With much of the world in turmoil, calling for higher economic growth is every politician's comfort blanket of choice. But Tim Jackson compellingly urges those politicians to give up their comfort blanket, to re-think our continuing dependence on economic growth, and to start preparing – urgently – for a world where such growth is no longer viable as its environmental cost massively exceeds its benefits."

"We must establish the ecological bounds on human activity. We must tackle the systemic inequalities which undermine social progress. We must fix the illiterate economics of relentless growth [...] A different economics is achievable. A better and fairer social logic lies within our grasp."

"The modern economy is structurally reliant on economic growth for its stability. [...] But question it we must. [...] No subsystem of a finite system can grow indefinitely – at least in physical terms. Economists have to be able to answer the question of how a continually growing economic system can fit within a finite ecological system. The only answer available is that growth in dollars must be 'decoupled' from growth in physical throughputs and environmental impacts. But [...] this hasn't so far achieved what's needed. There are no prospects for it doing so in the immediate future. And the sheer scale of decoupling required to meet the limits set out here (and stay within them in perpetuity while the economy keeps on growing) staggers the imagination. In short, we have no alternative but to question growth. The myth of growth has failed us."

"Prosperity, in any meaningful sense of the term, is about the quality of our lives and relationships, about the resilience of our communities and about our sense of individual and collective meaning."

"Two recent studies of the geomagnetic field in the last 1Myr have found 14 excursions, large changes in direction lasting 5–10kyr each, six of which are established as global phenomena by correlation between different sites. The older picture of the geomagnetic field enjoying long periods of stable polarity may not therefore be correct; instead, the field appears to suffer many dramatic changes in direction and concomitant reduction in intensity for 10–20 per cent of the time. During excursions the field may reverse in the liquid outer core, which has timescales of 500yr or less, but not in the solid inner core, where the field must change by diffusion with a timescale of 3kyr. This timescale is consistent with the remarkably uniform duration of well-dated excursions. The disparity of dynamical timescales between the inner and outer cores, a factor of 10, is consistent with the 10 excursions between full reversals."

"Earthquakes generate elastic waves when one block of material slides against another; the break between the two blocks being called a fault. Explosions generate elastic waves by an impulsive change in volume in the material. Small explosive charges are used in controlled-source seismic experiments in which the waves penetrate only a few kilometres into the earth."

"Earthquakes radiate waves with periods of tenths of seconds to several minutes. Rocks behave like elastic solids at these frequencies. Elastic solids allow a variety of wave types and this makes the ground motion after an earthquake or explosion (called an event) quite complex. There are two basic types of elastic wave: one involving compression and rarefaction of the elastic material in the direction of propagation of the wave, and one involving no compression but shear of the elastic material perpendicular to its direction of propagation. These are called P and S waves respectively, for primary and secondary since the P wave travels fastest and arrives first."

"After a large earthquake the earth "rings" like a bell; this motion can be observed on sensitive instruments up to a month after a large event. These oscillations have specific frequencies which are properties of the whole earth and which can be measured very accurately indeed. The lowest frequency oscillation has a period of about one hour. Any combination of seismic waves can be represented as an equivalent combination of normal modes. In practice the mode representation is most useful at low frequency — for seismic waves above about 40 s — since at higher frequencies the number of modes becomes prohibitively large."

"... since the Second World War ... the proton magnetometer has revolutionized measurements, satellites have given new impetus to magnetic surveying, discoveries of large mineral deposits have maintained activity in conventional magnetic prospecting, and geomagnetism has continued to play a central role in major scientific developments such as plate tectonics (where the time scale of reversals of the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field still provides the main source of information on the movement of the plates.)"

"The company is a living system. Employees are its lifeblood. Strategy is the brain and measurement and communication the central nervous system. Culture is the DNA. Leadership and continued entrepreneurial energy are its soul and spirit. Governance and accountability are its rhythms and disciplines, like exercise, a means of keeping this living organism fit and lean. Leadership gives a company energy. Governance assures its honesty.**"

"Governance and leadership are the yin and the yang of successful organisations. If you have leadership without governance you risk tyranny, fraud and personal fiefdoms. If you have governance without leadership you risk atrophy, bureaucracy and indifference."

"Chapter 1, p. 22"

"(quote from p. 62)"

"Introduction, p. ix"

"Chapter 2, p. 30"

"Chapter 10, p. 313"

"Chapter 10, p. 338 (remark translated from H. A. Schwarz's Formeln und Lehrsätze zum Gebrauche der elliptischen Funktionen)"

"Chapter 1, p. 1"

"Chapter 10, p. 429"

"Chapter 1, p. 27"

"Acts of hostility shall be intended matters of force."

"The Judge is intrusted with the liberties of the people, and his saying is the Law."

"The last thirty years [1925 to 1955] have seen an enormous improvement in the position of geometry as a branch of mathematics, or, rather, have seen the re-integration of geometry into the main fabric of mathematics. Indeed, one can go further and say that with the restoration of geometry to its rightful place in the mathematical scheme the process of fragmentation which had been doing so much harm to mathematics has been reversed, and we may look forward to the day in which there are no longer analysts, algebraists, geometers and so on, but simply mathematicians. Mathematical research has two aspects, motivation and technique, and when the latter gains control the result is apt to be excessive specialisation. The revolution of geometrical thought, and the reinstatement of geometry as one of the major mathematical disciplines, have helped to bring about a unification of mathematics which we may justly regard as one of the major contributions of the last quarter century to the subject."

"Conway made a fortuitous match for a Ph.D. adviser in Harold Davenport, considered the leader of the internationally respected British school of number theory. And while politically and socially speaking Conway was a radical, Davenport was a conservative. “All changes are for the worse,” he'd say. And looking back upon his career and his charges, he said: “I had 2 very good students. Baker”—Alan Baker, later a Fields Medalist—“to whom I would give a problem and he would return with a very good solution. And Conway, to whom I would give a problem and he would return with a very good solution to another problem.”"

"Mathematicians are extremely lucky, they are paid for doing what they would by nature have to do anyway. One should not have a non-teaching fellowship too long, there comes a time when one must make a contribution to society. Great mathematics is achieved by solving difficult problems not by fabricating elaborate theories in search of a problem."

"Though he died in 1946, Keynes still dominated economics at Cambridge in the mid-1960s. It wasn't just that all the leading figures among the faculty, Richard Kahn, Joan Robinson, Brian Reddaway, David Champernowne, Nicholas Kaldor, and James Meade, had been his pupils and/or collaborators. It was the tone of the place. The study of economics, theoretical or empirical, was driven by the desire to improve the conduct of economic policy. This did not mean that pure theory was neglected. Indeed, in those years Robinson was fighting a stirring battle in the realms of high theory with Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Nor was Cambridge innocent of the cutting edge of econometric technique. Richard Stone, who, following Keynes's suggestions, had created the first modern national income accounts, was still director of the Department of Applied Economics where much of modern econometrics was pioneered. Nonetheless, we were taught that theory and technique should serve the higher cause of rational economic policies, and to use our newly learned econometric expertise to write essays on unemployment, or inflation, or the balance of trade, or some other topic at the top of the current political agenda."

"Skidelsky tells us Keynes was also practical, absorbed in questions of economic policy, argumentative, benevolent and intolerant, often rude, and had an intellectual arrogance that would allow positions previously held with great passion to be calmly abandoned. Well, that is exactly what the Cambridge faculty was like in the 1960s. Not only did the ghost of Keynes dominate the content of economics education at Cambridge, it also dominated the style. That style could be sustained with substance only by the extraordinarily gifted. So it is not surprising that the Cambridge faculty, although still very "Keynesian," looks much more conventional these days."

"Hodge's work was in the great tradition of Riemann and Poincaré but his more immediate inspiration came from the work of Lefschetz, for whom he had a tremendous admiration."

"In mathematics we agree that clear thinking is very important, but fuzzy thinking is just as important."