5 Indian Women Mathematicians to Celebrate on International Math Day
14th March is the International Day for Mathematics. Here are five Indian women in mathematics that you should know about on this day.
Parimala Raman
Parimala Raman is an Indian mathematician known globally for her contribution to algebra. She is the recipient of several national and international awards including the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (1987) and the Srinivasa Ramanujan Birth Centenary Award (2003). Parimala was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich in 1994.
In 2010, she received one of the highest global honors in mathematics when she was chosen as the plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
On National Science Day in 2020, the Women and Child Development, Government of India announced the establishment of a chair in the name of Parimala Raman along with ten great Indian Women Scientists at Institutes across India.
Neena Gupta
In 2021, Neena Gupta became the third woman and fourth Indian to receive the prestigious 2021 DST-ICTP-IMU Ramanujan Prize for young mathematicians from developing countries. She is a professor at the Statistics and Mathematics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata.
She is honored with many awards like the Swarna Jayanti Fellowship Award given by the Department of Science and Technology (2015), the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (2019), etc. In 2022, she was invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). She was also awarded the Nari Shakti Puraskar on 8 March 2022.
Sujatha Ramdorai
Sujatha Ramdorai is an algebraic number theorist known for her work on the Iwasawa theory. She is a professor of mathematics and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She was previously a professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. She holds an adjunct professorship position at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune.
Together with a few other mathematicians, Sujatha Ramdorai formulated a non-commutative version of the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory, on which many foundations of this important subject are based.
Sujatha Ramdorai became the first Indian to win the prestigious ICTP Ramanujan Prize in 2006. She is also the recipient of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (2004).
Mangala Narlikar
Mangala Narlikar is an Indian mathematician who has done research in pure mathematics as well as written for a lay audience. After her degree in mathematics, she initially worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai and later worked as a lecturer at the University of Bombay and Pune. Mangala Narlikar has published several scientific papers and books which include some books on mathematics for children.
She explains mathematics in simple terms by which any layman can understand the concepts of mathematics. She also made sure that those books written by her were affordable to the common man. Appointed Chairperson of Balbharti, she made several significant changes in the state vernacular curriculum, particularly the simplification of the names of numbers.
Kavita Ramanan
Kavita Ramanan is a probability theorist who works as a professor of applied mathematics at Brown University. Ramanan earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 1992. She completed her Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Brown University in 1996. She works on probability theory, stochastic processes, and their applications.
Besides founding the Math CoOp, a group that develops open-access math presentations for students from elementary school to undergraduates, she has also been elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (2013); American Mathematical Society (2018); Institute for Operations Research and the Management Science (2018); and American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (2019).
–Staff Reporter
