This week, senior researcher Frits van Beckum of the Applied Analysis and Mathematical Physics group in the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science will put 37 years of service at the UT behind him as he retires.
His fields of expertise range from numerical analysis and mathematical modeling to optics and nonlinear waves. One of the most rewarding aspects of his work involves collaborative projects he and his group's head professor, Brenny van Groesen, have set up with the Center of Mathematics (P4M) at the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) in Indonesia.
When van Groesen scouted out Indonesian universities and chose P4M-ITB as a partner in research and graduate education - not to mention as an institution rife with PhD candidate recruitment potential - van Beckum immediately signed up to help. At the Indonesian mathematics department, van Beckum found `good levels in every respect.' However, van Beckum explains, `In spite of the technical environment, mathematicians there did not do technical things. Of course the students of the ITB mathematics department had talent and intelligence, but the program stuck to fundamental mathematics, rather than logistics or computational physics, for example.'
A keen proponent of interdisciplinary collaboration, van Beckum encouraged his Indonesian colleagues to overcome their intellectual insecurities and reach out to other disciplines for joint projects. Van Beckum and van Groesen suggested starting with the Oceanography Department located within the same building. Eventually such work extended to other fields like physics of non-linear optics.
Since 1991, van Beckum has worked with young master's level Indonesian staff members. The cream of this crop are usually offered the opportunity to pursue a doctorate at the UT. Five years ago, P4M-ITB began a PhD program in conjunction with the UT. Today, ITB doctoral candidates reside in Bandung, but have two supervisors - one at ITB and one at the UT - and come to the UT for two to three months each year.
According to van Beckum, mathematics education at the ITB traditionally has been formula-oriented. He offers a colorful image of `mathematics as a dark cloud hanging from the ceiling where all the answers are located. The teacher, a veritable guru, asks a question. With a stick, a student pokes into the cloud to find The Answer. This is virtually impossible because the student never really knows where to poke the stick and always comes up with an incorrect answer. There is frustration on all sides.' Happily, van Beckum reports that he has witnessed changes in this pedagogical style.
Van Beckum prefers what he dubs an academic attitude, `As a mathematician, you have to be able to defend the results. You must constantly ask yourself, “How can I understand this to be true?” As a teacher, you must teach students to adopt this attitude and be critical of their own results.' Such are the principles van Beckum has strived to instill in his Indonesian students over the past 13 years.
Furthermore, he has experienced great satisfaction helping students learn to understand and interpret results, to make connections between ideas not taught explicitly in their mathematics courses. The ITB is a conservative institute where van Beckum implements innovative approaches with remarkable success. There, he seeks to instill confidence in students concerning their ability to analyze physical situations.
Now what? With his free time, van Beckum intends to increase his activities in Indonesia and Malaysia, engaging in workshop and seminar activities with young staff members. In fact, he leaves in just a few days for Indonesia to continue his work there.
In the meantime, with friends and colleagues, van Beckum fêtes his 37-year tenure at the UT tonight with - what else? - an Indonesian meal.
