Monday, August 13, 2007

Math in Turkey

There is a recent story and a request for a petition signing that SEEMS like we should support it, but rather than repeat the story, here are pointers. It involves a Math Summer School in Turkey being closed down, and the person running it being arrested for "Education without permission" for apparently no good reason.

See Terry Tao's blog: here and a weblog he points to here.


  1. Is the school free of charges?

    If the Turkish law prohibits establishing schools without prior permission then the school should be closed.

  2. Turkish law just requires prior permissions for educational activities and authorities have already stated that all permissions will be granted if an application occurs regarding this mathematic camp.

    Furthermore this is not a prevention of a simple class. Prof. Nesin wants to establish a village of math, which is a wonderful idea, without following no official procedures. He states the reason he insists on that is he found it humiliating to ask for a permission to give lectures as an academician. He defines his action as a civilian disobedience.

  3. Kind of funny that dictatorships need laws to enforce their stupid, irrational and totalitarian ways of ruling a society. It's also kind of funny to sign a petition against the prohibition of a summer school in a dictatorship.

    p.s. for those who don't know Turkey has parliament, elections etc, but the army is the one that literally is the government either implicitly or through the so called "mini-coups d'état".

  4. Education in for Israel and Palestine.
    It is strange how people can be concerned with relatively small problems that concern only few dozens persons and totally ignore problems that concerns tens of thousands :

  5. Anonymous #3 is either Greek or Armenian, and definitely doesn't follow the news about Turkey as closely as he thinks.

  6. Hey, its apt that permission should be there to give education in large pupil capacity...

    Suma valluru