Indian maths geniuses refused US visas

LEE GOMES IN THE Wall Street Journal reports on Manindra Agrawal and his whistle stop tour of the USA.

Agrawal has solved a method to decide whether a number is prime or not, although even the Indian boffin admits there's no practical use to the solution, elegant as it may be.

Indian mathematicians invented zero thousands of years back but Gomes appears to have failed to put two and two together.

These are the Indian numbers in the Devanagari script from 1 to 0. The coincidence is no coincidence. Quite a few of the designs for the numbers we use in the Western world are derived, via Arabian contact with Hindu mathematicians, from these same glyphs.

Perhaps Mr Gomes didn't read our story last week in which Microsoft's Bill Gates, speaking in India, said 20 per cent of his engineers were from the subcontinent.

In many a US IT story, we've noticed, the real sting, or point, comes in the tail, that is to say at the very end of the story, not at the top. This is the direct opposite of British journalism, which gets the point in at the top then tails off.

Agrawal's work on prime numbers, which might earn him a Nobel prize and could upset the apple cart of Internet security, was accomplished with two other Indians - Nitin Saxena and Neeraj Kayal.

But these two folk were refused visas - presumably not because of security concerns - but apparently because of the current fuss over cheap Indian labour. Shortsightedness is never 20/20. µ

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