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Tamil Nadu
He rues nation’s neglect of mathematical research
K. Manikandan
Prof. S.R.S. Varadhan
Tambaram: Some people place him in the list of eminent mathematicians India produced in the last century. Though the Professor of Mathematics and Frank J. Gould Professor of Science at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, S.R.S. Varadhan’s career graph has always looked up, his crowning glory was when he was given the Abel Prize for Mathematics by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
In an interview to The Hindu he spoke about what went wrong in mathematical research in India, a country that gave the world zero.
“Importance was given to research in mathematics soon after Independence, but, somewhere down the line, it stopped,” Prof. Varadhan laments.
He was recently at Tambaram, where he participated in a function to dedicate a cardio thoracic block named after him at the Hindu Mission Hospital.In India, research in mathematics is restricted to a few premier institutes. It needs to be extended to all educational institutions, including schools. “It is equally important to train teachers in schools and colleges.”
Prof. Varadhan studied in a government school at Ponneri and did intermediate in mathematics at Madras Christian College, Tambaram, in 1956. He graduated in B.Sc (Honours) Statistics from Presidency College, Chennai, and obtained his Ph.D from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He then went to Courant, where he has been serving ever since.
The Abel Prize presented to Prof. Varadhan states that his areas of work include probability theory, for which he is renowned, and large deviations that have applications in statistics, insurance and finance, among others.
He is married to Vasundhara, a professor in media studies in New York University. The couple’s eldest son, Gopal, died in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre, where he was working. Their second son, Ashok (35), lives in the U.S.
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