Delete comment from: Computational Complexity
The statistic about Indian PhD production may say more about the gap between India and China in this one category, than about India and China versus the US. PhD production in CS in China is much closer to that of the US (precise numbers are hard to find, though, it seems).
I am also quite optimistic about both the US and China in terms of the future of computer science research. But why is this always presented as a competition for number one? Suppose both countries do well in this area but China slowly overtakes the US - would that be so much worse than both countries not doing well but the US keeping its top spot? It's not a zero sum game.
Long term, a more interesting question to ask might be: if we see the emergence of a very large Chinese scientific community, we may also see more and more strong research being published in Chinese language publications. What will the absence of one dominant language (probably a historical accident of the last 50 years anyway, but one that has happened at the same time we have had an explosion of scientific research around the world) do to the research community? At the moment, we are getting more and more English language publications by Chinese researchers, but given the size of the Chinese research community you will probably also get more and more good work published in Chinese. English will clearly be important for a long time, but we may get two dominant languages.
Oct 23, 2008, 3:30:00 PM
Posted to Academic Dominance