Kamangir (Archer)

Seventy Million Brains

Kamangir | April 30, 2006 | Category Iran

The bus hit the sideways and dropped down the valley. That kind of accident was nothing special for that part of the mountain-side roads if a very special logo was not painted on the side of the bus. Covered by clay, the logo read “Sharif University of Technology”. Aboard the bus were sitting top students of the Mathematics Department, many of which were famous winner of the International Mathematics Olympiad. Six students were killed, dozen others injured. A few days after the accident, I saw some of the survivors, with bandage over their heads and hands. They were talking about another student, whose condition was severe at the time.
Maryam Mirzakhani (see) is selected among the ten sharpest minds of North America (see). I remember when I took a course on Graph Theory. The text book, which was a very famous one, had her name in the bibliography. It was very interesting for me to see her name and know that she actually survived from the wounds. She was lucky to stay alive after the bus went down to the river. She was in the accident because Sharif University could not afford sending the topmost Math students by bus to a destination more than a thousand kilometers away. The students attended a national Math Conference and many of them never returned home. At least, Mirzakhani did.
She is now a professor in Princeton. I do not know if she is intending to stay abroad for ever, or she will return to Iran “to serve the nation”. What I know is that the administration’s leniency towards brain drain actually is not that bad. Personally, I prefer brain drain over brain annihilation.

Ahmadinejad once answered a reporter’s question about brain drain by saying “brain drain? I have not heard of that! Some people have left the country. But, still we have another seventy million brains here”. I hope he was not counting himself as one.