The social change triangle: Learning, Innovation and Inequality
Prof. V Kumar Murthy received his PhD from Harvard University in mathematics, specifically in arithmetic geometry. He has been professor at the University of Toronto since 1987. He was chair of the Department of Mathematics from 2008-2017 and Director of the Fields Institute from 2019-2024. He has published more than 150 papers and authored or edited 10 books, the latest being "The Science of Human Possibilities" published by Sutherland House Experts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Foreign Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (India). In 2019, he received the Connaught Global Challenge Award to study "Smart Villages".
Around the world the concept of "smart cities" is being studied. The phrase is usually used to mean an urban environment in which the infrastructure is integrated with the help of (intelligent) technology. We ask the question of what one might mean by "smart" in contexts where there is no (or limited) infrastructure. In particular, what is a "smart village"? In studying this, we realized that in fact "smart" is not apriori connected to technology or infrastructure. We propose that a "smart community" is a model of social organization in which one minimizes the cost function of static inequality and maximizes the flow of learning. Learning and inequality are connected through innovation. We shall explain this "social change triangle".
