it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair

on the terrible situation of Venezuela universities

Some colleagues of mine have started a funding project to help support to some degree our desperate Venezuelan colleagues in maths and stats, who are working under unbelievable duress! For instance, at Universidad Central de Venezuela, in Caracas,  which I visited in 2007 and where I gave a short course on MCMC to a large group of enthusiastic graduate students, the building of the department of mathematics has been closed for sanitary reasons and now houses vultures who nest in former offices as the one above… Other departments at UCV have already closed. This comes as no surprise given the general state of the country, where basic needs are increasingly missing, but the disappearance of what was a great education system in South America is a tragedy on its own!