President Armen Sarkissian conducted a distant learning class for students and gave an assignment related to the coronavirus: selfisolation or staying home is an excellent opportunity to ponder, learn, and develop

Today, President Armen Sarkissian employed distant learning and through the video gave a lecture to a group of students of the Mathematics and Mechanics, Physics, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Departments of the Yerevan State University.

The lecture, which reminded him of his student and lecturer years at the YSU, Armen Sarkissian started speaking of the current hot topic of the new coronavirus and noted in particular, “We all are going through extraordinary times when coronavirus is spreading in Armenia and all over the world. Each of us is trying to live not in selfisolation but preserving certain social distance from others. I believe that for anyone to maintain social distance and focus on one’s work is actually a good thing, especially for young people since there is a lot to think about and learn.”

In the context of his lecture topic, the President of Armenia spoke about epidemics and noted that for thousands of years there were multiple epidemics of different nature, bacteria and virus born. Before the first and second millennia, before antibiotics were discovered, there was only one way to fight bacterial epidemics – to maintain social distance, i.e. selfisolation. “In 1665 another bacterium, which under different names had been circulating all over Europe for decades, reached London and triggered the so called London epidemic which claimed lives of hundred thousand people,” President Armen Sarkissian told. “The epidemic spread to nearby towns and reached Oxford and Cambridge. On August 1665, Cambridge University was closed down. Isaak Newton was a student of Trinity college of Cambridge University, a young 23-year-old student who was instructed to leave the university immediately. Newton asked the leadership of the college for the permission to take a large number of books from the college with him, returned to his paternal home and spent almost a year there. He was selfisolated for one year, almost never left his home, only sometimes went out to purchase small crystals from a nearby jewelry store. In one year, Isaak Newton exercised enormous mental activity, he was passing his time by reading and registered great success in at least three areas. The fundamentals of mathematics, including differentiated analysis, are also linked to the name of Newton. The second is the area of optics: using crystals purchased at the store, he was the first to discover that light is not just light. It consists of multiple colors which comprise a spectrum. And the third: the legend has it that the gravitation theory was formed in Newton’s mind at that very time and was related to an apple tree in the garden of his paternal house.

Isaac Newton returned to Cambridge, from student very fast became professor and later became the Dean of the Trinity College. That one year was very productive for Newton.”

Speaking about selfisolation, President Armen Sarkissian said, “Selfisolation and staying home, especially under these circumstances, is a splendid opportunity to ponder, to learn, to develop yourselves, may be even to come back to university with genious ideas like Newton’s.”

As for coronavirus, the President said that we would overcome it all together. “Remember that to do that each of you should have a precise objective and a plan for this one or next several months and, at the same time, be disciplined,” President Sarkissian noted. “To be organized and disciplined is essential. Be responsible not only towards our country, nation, this huge health issue but also towards yourselves. Time is one of your greatest assets, and if for one month you stay home and connect virtually to the world, it should be used to its utmost.” The President continued to link the topic of coronavirus with physics and mathematics and juxtaposed it with the global risks emerging in the world. “Speaking of coronavirus and glancing back at history, we see epidemic of this scale existed in all times and claimed millions of human lives,” Armen Sarkissian said. “However, looking back twenty, thirty, forty years we see that our attitude towards coronavirus is totally different. Is this virus really that different? Yes, it is, because all viruses are mutatations of already existing viruses and possess new qualities.

The world is very different today. I have been thinking of that world for many years, even tried to apply mathematics here, and I call it quantum. Quantum in the sense that processes going on today in the world are not classical because the speed is different, very often we move very fast. Second, our communications have the speed of light. Third, quantum in the sense that old approaches – in politics, economy, relations, have almost stopped to work and new forms are being created. Thus, global risks too, acquire certain quatum nature, i.e. they are not predictable in a classical way. It was impossible to predict that, let’s say, the virus would start in China, the next country would be Italy, or, let’s say, France. Months ago, in one of my speeches I spoke about a quantum world and said as an example that if an illness starts in China, the next country where it appears could be Argentine or Italy. It certainly was not a prediction but another quantum process. Of course, we can turn this into a conspiracy, like I knew that it would happen in China, then Italy but this is nothing but a quantum behavior.”

The President of Armenia said that financial global risks are also quantum in their behavior, even terrorism is quantum.

According to the President, we are living now in a new world where modern technologies will be the main investment; we have entered a new process which he calls the R-evolution, meaning rapid revolution. The changes will happen not phase by phase but each phase will merge with the other and processes will happen very fast. “As a result, today we have technologies which 10, 20 years ago where viewed as bizarre,” President Sarkissian said. “For us all, the way to develop is to see what’s the next phase. And the next phase will be related to artificial intelligence, mathematical modeling, and machine learning. Revolutions, which we will see in healthcare and other areas, will be phenomenal, inconceivable. We must be ready for that. We must train not just software engineers for tomorrow but specialists of mathematical modeling, who will be able to model the future, the people, who can make modeling of the highest quality and provide solutions. I am glad that you are the generation which will deal with it. Selfisolation is a fact and each of you has the opportunity to do what Isaak Newton did.”

At the conclusion of the lecture, President Sarkissian suggested that each of the students think and solve a problem related to coronavirus through mathematical modeling. “You can right down any problem you want related to global risks along with its modeling. It can be 1 or 10 pages. Your deadline is the end of the emergency situation. I believe the best way to learn is to question any idea presented to you, even the absolute truth written in the book. If Einestain and Isaak Newton could do it, why can’t you, why can’t you make the next step?”