Maths Award For A Monk

Mahan Maharaj
A mathematician exploring rubber-sheet geometry at the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University, Belur, and a cryptologist at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, have won the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prizes, often dubbed the nation’s highest science awards, for 2011.

Both win the annual award from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research for their contributions to the mathematical sciences. The CSIR on Monday also announced the names of nine other scientists who will get the prizes for biological sciences, chemical sciences, earth sciences, engineering sciences, medical sciences and physical sciences.

Mahan Maharaj, who studied at IIT Kanpur and the University of California, Berkeley, before joining the Vivekananda University in 1998, has made fundamental contributions to the study of curved geometry in three-dimensions, his associates said.

Palash Sarkar, at the ISI’s applied statistics unit, has been involved in the design of mathematical rules that allow information to be exchanged securely between distant geographic sites over an insecure network. One of his research initiatives has led to a set of rules to enhance the security and speed of data accessible through laptops.

“Maharaj has been exploring properties of geometrical spaces that do not change when they are stretched or pulled or twisted,” said Harish Seshadri, a mathematician at IISc, Bangalore, who has collaborated with the monk in a forthcoming research paper on multi-dimensional geometrical spaces.

Mahan Maharaj, who teaches MSc students and takes course work for PhD students, joined the RK Mission institution in 1998 after a PhD from the UCB. “This is a joyful day for us,” said the university’s vice-chancellor, Swami Atmapriyananda.

Sarkar’s research on encryption techniques — mathematical rules for coding and decoding information — has led to a new algorithm (a set of rules) that can improve the speeds of existing algorithms, some of which are used in commercial laptops to encrypt data while maintaining speed of accessing data.

“In a short span of time, Sarkar has also guided four PhD students,” said Rana Barua, a professor at the ISI’s statistics and mathematics unit, who also works on cryptology.

Swami Atamapriyananda said the award to Mahan Maharaj should also be seen as a tribute to the vision of Swami Vivekananda who had more than a century ago thought of an institution that could maintain ancient Indian wisdom and pursue research in the natural and humanistic sciences.
The 45-year-old is fluent in English, Hindi and Bengali. Born Mahan Mitra, he studied in St Xavier's Collegiate School till Class XII and cracked IITJEE to enter the prestigious IIT Kanpur to study electrical engineering. Soon, he realized that he was not enjoying this field of study and changed to mathematics. After completing his MSc, he went to University of California, Berkeley. After coming back from US, he renounced the world and became a monk.