I am writing this post in the hope of shedding some light on the true essence and relevance of the Maths and Physics Club and its activities.

While it is completely true that our goal is to have and share the fun of Maths and Physics, and we do have fun posting maths or physics-related memes and articles, conducting competitive quizzing events and so on, the vision of the club goes deeper than that.

The process of scientific investigation, where you probe into some topic in an unbiased manner with a genuine urge to understand, is a joyful one. You can verify this with how elated you feel when you have solved a puzzle/problem elegantly. But this process is also important in other ways. This art of understanding, as one learns while doing the basic sciences, helps one a lot in other fields (especially STEM fields) as well. And this is not just applicable to research in Maths and Physics.

Certainly one cannot be a great engineer without having a solid understanding of basic physics, one cannot be exceptional in the corporate world without having some respect for the analytical thinking in Logic problems and puzzles. So, definitely, someone who is passionate about engineering will find Physics Detective, Bazinga! and SciComp Blitz interesting! And people sitting for corporate interviews (among others) would be interested in Logic GC, Bamboozled! and Winter of Puzzles! From this standpoint, we can see that directly or indirectly, the club has something to offer to everyone.

Unfortunately, the value of this art of scientific understanding is reducing in the eyes of most people. Subjects like maths and physics are looked at (by many, not all) as boring and dull, something that one reluctantly has to do in order to move ahead on the academic path. The consequence of this is that the average quality of work in STEM fields is bound to reduce. Sincere efforts need to be taken to change this mindset of people.

Knowing all this, I believe that the club has a worthy mission on its hands, and the role of its managing team becomes all the more important. We need a team of people who themselves love Maths & Physics (and the art of scientific understanding) and are passionate enough to come up with ways to communicate and share this love and joy with other people! It’s exciting to think about the kind of far-reaching impact all this will directly/indirectly have on the students of IIT Bombay!

Looking forward to interacting with prospective members of the team! Regards

Tharun and Dhawal

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