IMSc Outreach - Newsletter

Our muscles do the tango

2025-12-31T00:00:00Z

Imagine a crowded ballroom. The music is low, muffled by the chatter of a thousand guests. You are in the middle of the assembly, trying to dance in sync with the crowd, but you cannot hear the beat clearly. You are confused, stepping on toes, and moving slightly out of time with the person next to you. Suddenly, you feel a firm, rhythmic nudge from your neighbor. Not an instruction, but a physical push that sets you in sync. You adjust your stance, align your feet, and suddenly, the chaos vanishes. You are part of the wave of dancers around you.

This isn’t just a scene from a party. It is happening inside you right now.

Every time your heart beats, your digestive system moves food along, or the uterus prepares for childbirth, millions of cells must contract in a carefully coordinated rhythm to keep these organs functioning properly. For decades, scientists have believed that this coordination was driven entirely by electrical signals between nerve cells, the “music” of the body.

If the electrical wiring was cut, it was thought that the body would fall into disarray. But a recent study by researchers Soling Zimik and Sitabhra Sinha from The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, has revealed that we were missing a crucial part of the performance. It turns out that when the electrical “music” fades, the body has a brilliant backup plan: it uses physical force to keep the beat.

To understand why this is a revolutionary finding, we have to look at how biological tissue works. Our organs are not made of identical units that are perfectly arranged, but are a complex messy neighbourhood, an assemblage of different types of cells having distinct behaviours. Some are “oscillatory”, meaning they are the natural drummers that keep a steady rhythm. Others are “excitable”, waiting for a signal to fire but otherwise sitting in the wings. For a long time, the prevailing wisdom in biology was that these cells communicate exclusively via electrical messages.When the “oscillatory” cells fire, the electrical signal travels through junctions linking neighbouring oscillatory cells in sequence, before finally reaching the excitable cells at the end of the relay, triggering their response.

But what happens when those electrical connections are weak? What happens when a piece of tissue is damaged by disease or age, and the electrical wiring is frayed? According to the traditional “electrical-only” view of biology, that part of the organ should lose coordination and become unresponsive to the signals. Yet, in many cases, our organs keep functioning. Zimik and Sinha asked the simple but obvious question: How?

Using a computational model that recreated a small patch of biological tissue as a lattice of interacting oscillatory and excitable cells, the authors explored what happens when electrical coupling becomes weak. They found that when electrical signals alone cannot keep the tissue in step, cells can fall back on a mechanical form of communication. As neighbouring cells contract and stretch one another, tiny channels in the cell membrane open, allowing ions to flow and thus restoring coordination through what are known as stretch-activated currents. This opening of the closed gates on the cell wall allows electrical currents to flow into the cell. Thus, it is a physical “nudge” that triggers the electrical signal which commands the cell to step in line with its neighbours.

The study found that these mechanical interactions allow for “global coherence” even when electrical signals are incapacitated. Going by our earlier analogy, this is like everyone dancing in sync to the music even when its “volume” is turned down low. By creating a mathematical model where they could adjust the strength of the electrical connections and the density of the rhythmic cells, they showed that mechanical coupling is able to overcome what they call the “source-sink mismatch”. In plain English, if one cell is falling out of step, the physical pull and push of its neighbours literally force it back into alignment. It is like the ballroom crowd physically grabbing each other to stay in rhythm, rather than just listening to the distant, muffled music.

This research does not just sit on a shelf; it changes how we think about human health and disease. One major area of impact is cardiac rhythm disorders. Such arrhythmias occur when the heart’s electrical system goes haywire. Doctors typically treat this with electrical interventions or medication to change how ions move through the cell membranes. However, in order to ensure that all the cells are reset, a large shock is required which damages the tissue and makes it heterogenous by creating scars. And very few pharmaceutical drugs that have been shown to be effective in treating cardiac arrhythmias.

The current study looks at this long-standing medical problem using a different lens altogether. According to the study, the heart is also relying on mechanical cues to synchronize, and by overlooking this key detail, our current treatments might be missing half the problem. If we can target the mechanical properties of the heart tissue, we might find new ways to stabilize irregular heart rhythms that have previously been extremely difficult to treat.

The same principles apply to the gastrointestinal tract. Conditions like irritable bowel syndrome often involve muscular contractions that are out of sync, leading to significant discomfort. By understanding how mechanical tension acts as a backup rhythm-setter, researchers can look toward therapies that address the physical stiffness or elasticity of the gut tissue rather than just trying to chemically influence the nerves. Furthermore, this research sheds light on the incredible coordination required during labour, where the uterus must transition from separate, uncoordinated contractions to an unified organ-wide contraction powerful enough for childbirth.

This discovery also invites a paradigm shift in how we approach diagnostic medicine. If a doctor could measure the mechanical properties of a patient’s tissue, essentially, how “stretchy” or “rigid” their cellular environment is, they could potentially predict who is at risk for rhythm disorders long before the symptoms appear. It opens the door to a future where we treat the physical architecture of the organs in as much detail as we consider its biochemistry.

Ultimately, Zimik and Sinha’s work serves as a humbling reminder that we are barely scratching the surface in unraveling the complexities of biology. We are not just a bag of reacting chemicals; we are physical, three-dimensional structures subject to mechanical forces of different kinds.

By viewing the body as a system where physics and biology are deeply intertwined, such a perspective may move us closer to solving some of the most persistent mysteries of human health and disease.

Next time you feel your heart racing or your stomach churning, take a moment to appreciate the silent, invisible dancers inside you.

Reference: Zimik, S., & Sinha, S. (2025). Mechanics Promotes Coherence in Heterogeneous Active Media. Physical Review Letters, 135, 248401. https://doi.org/10.1103/8gqg-rsrl

The omni-present but elusive mongoose

2025-12-31T00:00:00Z

India is home to six species of mongoose. The Indian grey mongoose (Urva edwardsii) is one of the most widespread Indian mongoose species amongst all of them. It is found across the continent and in some parts of the Middle East.

Apart from their services used in controlling pests, traditionally mongooses were valued for their tail hair used in making painting brushes and were poached across their home range. Now this demand has gone down due to the availability of synthetic hair which are used to make painting brushes.

This painting of the mongoose seen on the IMSc campus was illustrated digitally. When I was asked to make this painting, I was a bit skeptical as I wasn’t sure how to capture the hair colour of this animal. The mongoose like many other animals like the black-naped hare and the Indian palm squirrel have hair, in which a single strand of hair has three colours in bands, namely, grey, white and ending in a black tip. This pattern is known as agouti and is a type of fur colouration described in wild animals giving them their characteristic grey-brown appearance. The challenge while making this painting was to authentically capture this pattern. I wanted to show the mongoose in its natural habitat and hence I have tried to show it a grassy meadow, hiding away in the undergrowth with it’s stealthy movements. I have additionally tried to capture tridex (Tridax procumbens) and obscure morning glory (Ipomoea obscura) commonly seen in the undergrowth to add a pop of colour to the illustration. On IMSc campus the mongoose is usually seen near the tennis court.

The graceful acrobat up in our trees

2025-12-31T00:00:00Z

The common bronzeback (Tamil: komberi mookan), Dendrelaphis tristis, is a non-venomous tree snake that is commonly seen in the Indian subcontinent. This long and slender snake lives on trees across diverse habitats, ranging from forests to urban gardens. It belongs to a subfamily of tree-dwelling vine snakes (Ahaetuliinae) distributed from south and south-east Asia to Australia, which evolved about 30 million years ago. These snakes consist of two related groups – those with rectangular snouts and round pupils, such as the common bronzeback and flying snakes (genus Chrysopelea), and sharp-nosed snakes with horizontal pupils, such as the Indian vine snake (Ahaetulla oxyrhyncha, Tamil: pachai pambu), which is found in the plains of peninsular India.

The common bronzeback can grow up to four feet long, and has a brown body and a pale yellow underside, with a white spot on its head, a black streak behind its eye and a bronze stripe running along its spine. When excited or disturbed, it expands its neck and upper body to reveal bright blue colouration between its scales. It has acute eyesight and is active during the day, when it stays alert and is quick to flee. The common bronzeback lives among bushes and trees across habitats and lays eggs in tree holes, leaf litter, and nests of birds. Like other vine snakes, the common bronzeback feeds on frogs, garden lizards, geckos, and small rodents and birds. It is not scared of heights, and is known to jump between branches of trees and even drop several meters to the ground.

Tree-dwelling snakes show adaptations to their skeletal structure, with a large number of vertebrae in their tails, which help them climb and travel between trees. A longer tail may help a tree snake traverse gaps by acting as a counterweight, which prevents its body from slipping downwards as it reaches across the gap. Recent biomechanics studies show that these snakes extend their body in a straight line to bridge small gaps, while they use more dynamic movements to cross gap distances greater than half of their body length. They start from a lower vertical position and use faster looped jumps for these challenging crossings. Flying snakes in the genus Chrysopelea are aerial acrobats, which leap from branches and glide large distances by flattening and undulating their bodies to generate lift and gain speed.

On the IMSc campus, the common bronzeback has been seen among shrubs and trees on the hostel side of the campus, and spotted climbing up a cannonball tree in the lawn near the main building.

New faculty on the block: Samya Kumar Ray

2025-12-16T00:00:00Z

How did your interest in mathematics develop?

I liked maths for as long as I can remember and my parents always encouraged me to pursue mathematics. I always tried to do math outside of school textbooks, but there were also occasions when this interest strengthened further. I remember visiting my father’s friend’s house after class 10, and his son, who had trained for the IIT JEE exam, had a lot of books, including many math books. I got hold of some of them, many of which were for the math olympiad, and got very interested in some of the problems they contained. For example, there were questions where a single equation is given with three unknown variables, and one needs to find positive integer solutions for them using the properties of numbers. Until then, I was always taught that one needs the same number of equations as the number of unknowns to find their solution. This was something that really interested me.

I also think mathematics is something that one can do ourselves, which makes it unique. One can get some good books and start working on problems, without the need to perform experiments or even depend on a teacher.

During my Bachelor’s, we were not exposed to mathematics as much to develop a strong interest in any one area. Initially, I was interested in algebra, but then I was gradually drawn to analysis after taking a lot of courses related to it. I started working on something called operator theory, which, in some sense, is about understanding infinite matrices. Then I worked on Fourier analysis, which is also a part of analysis. What I work on currently merges these two fields.

What do you work on?

What I do is called noncommutative analysis. Commutativity, for example, means that if you multiply two numbers, it doesn’t matter in which order you multiply them. For instance, 2 multiplied by 3, or 3 multiplied by 2, are equivalent. However, the same is not true when we multiply matrices, which is noncommutative. In the same way, when mathematical objects represent actions or transformations, the order in which they are combined becomes significant, and in many cases they are noncommutative. Noncommutative analysis is useful in quantum physics, for example, in quantum information theory, where the definition of problems comes from physics, but the mathematics that comes afterwards is of interest to people like me.

At IMSc, I would like to continue working on noncommutative analysis, a comparatively new field with many problems that one can explore. I would also like to work on interesting problems in operator theory, a field I have worked on earlier. I also have a strong interest in probability theory and the geometry of linear spaces.

What are some of your other interests?

I have an interest in music, and I play the guitar.

New faculty on the block: Govind R

2025-12-15T00:00:00Z

How did your interest in research develop?

My interest in research started with reading popular science books and science fiction. Thanks to my parents and grandfather, I read books about science, such as those by George Gamow, and the science magazines Eureka and Sasthragathi by the Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad. During my childhood, I also got to spend three years at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, where my father was doing his PhD. Interacting with his friends and participating in science club activities played an important role in giving me some perspective about science.

When I joined NIT Calicut for my undergraduate studies, a mentor, Prof Murali Krishnan, gave me a flavour of the different courses in theory. I also got to do internships at IISc and interacted with people there, which attracted me to theoretical computer science. At this point, I did not have much exposure to automata and formal verification methods, themes I work on currently. However, CMI has a substantial number of people working on these subjects who also teach courses, and that really helped me converge on these topics. CMI also sees many visitors from France every year, who offer courses and spend time there doing research. Working with one of them, Paul Gastin from Laboratoire Spécification et Vérification, ENS Paris-Saclay introduced me to research and how it is done.

What do you work on?

What I work on, broadly, is called formal methods, where the idea is to take a system and ensure that it behaves correctly at all times. The goal is to take systems from real life, typically software systems which are huge, and model them using automata-based models and state their specific properties, typically using logical specifications. Formal verification is where you take an automata model and a logical specification and ensure that the model is guaranteed to satisfy this specification. One way people did this earlier is by testing, where you try several inputs to check if the specification is satisfied. However, this is unsatisfactory for safety-critical systems, where the goal is to ensure that the system always satisfies the property. For example, space projects which have millions of components, where there is a combinatorial explosion of state space. This is where developing efficient techniques of verification becomes important.

For my PhD, I worked on timed automata, which is used to express settings with time constraints. My goal was to develop efficient algorithms to address networks of timed automata, which are commonly used to model complex real-time systems. A lot of the work in this area asks verification questions such as ‘Does this system satisfy a property?’. But one could also ask a complementary question ‘Can we automatically generate a system that meets a given logical specification?’. This is called synthesis, which is also something that I have been working on.

During my postdoc, I wanted to do more theory, and so I explored the extensions of automata models, where I looked into the inherent connections between machine models, logical formalisms, and algebraic structures, and developed procedures to transform one to the other, which is very important from an algorithmic context. During my second postdoc, my goal was to look at models of modern processors and programming languages. The question that interested me was, ‘Can you develop theoretical models for the behaviour of these processors and formally prove the correctness of these models?’. Additionally, I have also been interested in developing algorithmic techniques to say that a processor’s behaviour is ‘good’ in some sense. In ongoing work that I am quite excited about, there is a new framework that we are working on which brings together programming language models and some of the automata related techniques that I was looking at previously.

What are some of your other interests?

I enjoy reading books and watching movies. Also watching football; I used to play football earlier.

New faculty on the block: Gopinath Mishra

2025-12-15T00:00:00Z

How did your interest in research develop?

I really liked solving puzzles in my childhood, and had a particular liking for mathematics. When I was in college during my Bachelor’s, I liked theoretical computer science, particularly algorithms. When I joined ISI for my Masters, I became more curious about the area of theoretical computer science and algorithms, which eventually led me to research.

What do you work on?

I am interested in algorithms when the data is very large and we have very limited access to it. The data can be so huge that we may not be able to read the dataset in its entirety even once. Or even if we are able to read the data once, we aren’t able to store it and access it at our disposal. It may be the case that the data is distributed across many systems instead of being available with a central computer.

My research is primarily theoretical. We study fundamental problems in the simplest possible theoretical models. When considering practical applications, many additional specifics must be taken into account, and suitably modified versions of the algorithms that retain theoretical guarantees may be applied.

In my PhD research, I worked on streaming and property testing with limited access to data. In the streaming model, we can read the entire data once but cannot store it. In property testing, we cannot read the entire data even once. During my postdoc, I worked on massively parallel models and distributed computing, where the data is stored across multiple computers. The massively parallel computation model is a standard framework for studying parallel computing today. It shares several algorithmic techniques with streaming and property testing. This overlap is one reason I became interested in this model during my first postdoctoral position, after completing my PhD in streaming and property testing. Towards the end of my first postdoc, I developed an interest in distributed computing, which is closely related to massively parallel computation models. This interest eventually led to my second postdoc, which focused solely on distributed computing. There is a common theme across my PhD and postdoc research involving randomized algorithms and graph problems under limited access to data, with a gradual shift across different computational models.

For the next few years of research, I want to focus on streaming, property testing, and distributed computing. My current work is focused on graph algorithms, including problems related to graph coloring, clustering, shortest paths, and graph parameter estimation.

What are some of your other interests?

I enjoy reading, particularly non-fiction books related to science, politics, and people’s struggles, which help keep me grounded. I also enjoy traveling, going on long walks, listening to music, and spending time with family and friends.

Nature-inspired model optimizes efficiency in collective tasks

2025-12-04T00:00:00Z

In many natural systems, such as foraging ants or schools of fish, collective behaviour is driven by individual events triggering group-wide synchronization. Inspired by this, scientists from The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai have developed a theoretical model that enables a group of search agents to find their target efficiently. This framework is useful in understanding the foraging strategies of animals and collective behaviour in swarms of search robots.

“In social groups, reaching a shared decision is often essential for survival and success. In many cases, the fate of an entire group can be steered by just a few individuals,” explains [Arnab Pal](https://sites.google.com/view/arnab-pal/home, IMSc faculty, who is one of the authors of the study.

Previous work has shown that this coordinated response occurs when an individual switches its state on reaching a threshold and interacts with its neighbours to propagate the change through the population. Ecological studies have shown that only a few individuals are sufficient to trigger a change that can cascade across a large social group.

The research team, including Pal and Arup Biswas from IMSc, and Satya N Majumdar from Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques, Paris, incorporated these ideas in their study. According to their ‘threshold resetting’ model, whenever any individual in a group of random search agents reaches a threshold condition, it triggers the entire group to collectively reset to a new state.

The team first derived the mean search time of the agents as a function of their survival probability – the probability that a search agent has not reached the target with or without first hitting the threshold. They then evaluated the model’s efficiency in terms of the time to find the target and the number of resets experienced during the search. The researchers tested this model for two types of search behaviour commonly seen in nature and technology: ballistic search, where individuals move in a directed, straight-line manner, and diffusive search, where individuals wander randomly.

Using analytical methods and simulations, the researchers found that agents behave optimally under threshold resetting by reducing the costs associated with the search process. This happens as synchronous resetting allows agents to explore diverse paths during the search process.

“We were able to use simple models inspired by statistical physics to show how individual behaviours can spontaneously trigger collective motion that improves the group’s overall performance,” says Pal. “This can occur when individuals act according to 'safety rules' or 'threshold principles', which encourage them to share cues with others, thereby triggering a global system-wide reorganization.”

The study suggests potential avenues of future work, by incorporating the cost of information transfer and spatial dynamics into the resetting process.

Reference: Biswas, A., Majumdar, S. N., & Pal, A. (2025). Target search optimization by threshold resetting. Physical Review Letters, 135(22), 227101. Biswas, A., Majumdar, S. N., & Pal, A. (2025). Target search optimization by threshold resetting. Physical Review Letters, 135(22), 227101. https://doi.org/10.1103/752c-wqly

Rajesh Gopakumar: Stringing together the forces of nature

2025-12-04T00:00:00Z

How did you get interested in physics?

I was interested in mathematics in middle school, but I also liked doing simple chemistry experiments. I didn't find school physics very interesting because I wasn't particularly thrilled by pulleys, inclined planes, and things like that. At some point, maybe in class 9 or 10, I learned that matter is made of atoms. I found it fascinating that all of chemistry is ultimately due to atoms, and I learned about quantum mechanics. I wanted to know more about this subject, which explains all the elements in the periodic table.

I tried to read some popular science books. These were the pre-Internet days, and knowledge was scarce, so you scrambled for it by getting hold of good books. There were very cheap Russian books by some very good authors. There weren't that many libraries, but luckily I lived next to the National Library in Kolkata and managed to smuggle myself in. There was also a whole street of second-hand books near the Presidency College. At some point, I think in class 11, I came across The Feynman Lectures, which was very eye-opening.

I was always debating between maths and physics, but at some level, I felt that physics gives you a deeper appreciation of certain areas of mathematics. I chose to study physics for my undergraduate degree because I felt it would be easier for me to be a physicist and enjoy its mathematical beauty, rather than being a mathematician and trying to do physics.

How would you explain string theory to a general audience?

It is not easy, because you want to strike a right balance between being faithful to the subject scientifically, while not being too technical at the same time. The real essence of quantum mechanics is very unintuitive, even for physicists. There, it is really the mathematics that governs your thinking and it is more difficult to convey.

While talking about string theory, I try to come up with examples or borrow metaphors that others have used. If someone has studied a little physics, they may have seen pictures of iron filings around a magnet. They form lines along a force field that one can visualise. When you bundle many of these lines together, they act in a coherent way as a string. Most people would have seen a violin string, and they know that it vibrates in different harmonics. This is one of the basic things you have to understand about string theory: that there are different vibrational modes and they correspond to more and more energetic excitations of the string.

Forces like electricity and magnetism can be thought of as modes of vibrations of these strings. Quite miraculously, the vibrations of similar strings also describe the force of gravity in a single framework. My research tries to put together these very disparate forces, thinking of them in terms of vibrations of strings.

Some of my work has had an impact on a specific area of mathematics called algebraic geometry, which studies the geometry of various complex surfaces. Mathematicians have been studying these surfaces with many tools of their own, and string theory offers a new perspective to learn more about their topology.

Mathematicians like to find things called topological invariants, surfaces that remain unchanged even when you deform them. For example, since all vadas have one hole in them, mathematicians would say that they have the same topology. It is a way of saying that a vada has only one hole, and that it is different from a football, which has no holes in it. These two objects are topologically distinct because you cannot change the shape of one into the other just by squeezing it, without tearing it apart.

There is a mathematical way to assign a number to each of these surfaces. If two surfaces have different numbers, there's no way you can squeeze or deform one into the other. In the case of the vada, this number is 1, which is the number of its holes. Similarly, a football has the number 0, and a pretzel has the number 3. This is the simplest of examples, but mathematicians also like to find ways of categorising more complex surfaces. In some remarkable way, string theory helps in understanding how to categorise them. In some of my early work, I was trying to understand something called gauge-string duality, but it turned out to have parallels with categorising complex surfaces.

String theory has a long history of good back and forth with mathematics, but recently it has also played a role in understanding aspects of strong interactions, quark-gluon plasma, strongly interacting condensed matter systems, high temperature superconductivity, and dark energy and dark matter in cosmology. String theory has played a role in expanding the space of ideas, the space of models and theories that people use.

How has the interaction between string theory and mathematics been possible?

I think physicists and mathematicians have traditionally always talked to each other. There was a bit of a disconnect in the mid-20th century, when there wasn’t as much communication. But in the 1970s, starting from some developments in quantum field theory, these conversations increased, and people realised that physicists were rediscovering some things that mathematicians had already worked out.

For instance, people like CN Yang realised that there is a clear dictionary between some concepts in mathematics and physics. These very insightful people realised that physicists and mathematicians are really talking about the same thing, but speaking in a slightly different language and thinking about it slightly differently. More people started talking and learning each other's vocabulary, and by the time string theory really matured, this conversation was already in place.

One very nice thing that has happened in the field of string theory is that it has invented almost new mathematical ways of thinking. Physicists think about things in a certain way and come to some conclusions based on their physical intuition, which can be very different from approaches that mathematicians have been taking. In fact, one of the leading figures in string theory, Edward Witten, won the Fields Medal in mathematics for his work on understanding the physics of knots.

Ed Witten is, I think, one person who could really bridge the gap between the two sides, and the same can be said for many of his students. This developed a certain culture in which the conversations happened more easily. In fact, that's how Witten arrived at this theory of knots. He was talking to another very famous mathematician, Michael Atiyah, who mentioned recent developments of people trying to understand knots and how to classify them. And soon after, Witten came up with a way to classify knots from a physics point of view.

Conversations are very important, and I think institutions like Matscience and ICTS try to foster these. A lot of creative things happen just over coffee or conversation. Of course, journals and conferences do help, but having people talk to each other more regularly and learn about each other’s problems in an informal, casual way helps.

String theory is often referred to as ‘the theory of everything’. What are some of the promising approaches in validating it?

I don’t like that phrase very much because it carries a lot of hubris. I think people started using it in the 1980s, because they thought that they would immediately be able to answer many questions about putting together all the forces. However, the progress has been slower than they expected. I think string theory is definitely a theory of something, if not everything. And I am satisfied with that.

About validating string theory: There are now very precise instruments trying to measure things related to the early universe. One is the microwave background, the 3 degree Kelvin radiation coming from the early universe, which appears uniform across the sky. But if you look closely using more precise instruments, you will see very small fluctuations, about one part in 100,000. This inhomogeneity comes from quantum fluctuations in the very early universe, which string theory can potentially say something about.

The other thing is related to the large-scale structure of galaxies. To first approximation, again, the universe looks broadly homogeneous. If you go to the very largest scale, where there are these super-clusters of galaxies, the universe is no longer homogeneous. It looks almost like a neuronal system where there are all these clumps and filaments. This clumping is again due to the same quantum fluctuations in the early universe, which one can potentially use to observationally test things in string theory.

Cosmology has become much more precise in making observations in the last 30 years, but I think we need even more precise measurements to do this. But human ingenuity is infinite. We discovered gravitational waves, which Einstein said humans will never be able to measure. However, people came up with very clever ways to measure it, and so I'm hopeful.

What advice do you have for students who are trying to make a choice between the theoretical and applied sciences?

I think they're both important. We need different kinds of people and different ways of thinking in India. People should make a choice according to their temperament and build on their strengths. Some people are naturally very good at coming up with ingenious experiments, like the one measuring gravitational waves. If you are very creative in putting things together, or have creative ideas about how to make measurements, you may have a flair for experiments. Some people may have a flair for mathematics and theory, and they should consider the theoretical sciences.

Many people in India think that theoretical sciences are the only way to do science. This is a structural weakness in our education system, and maybe even in our outreach. We are not cultivating enough people who like to tinker around, make and build things.

What are some of the improvements in science policy that can be introduced in India?

In terms of education, very broadly, one has to cultivate a scientific temper among young children in schools. Science shouldn't be treated as a book with some facts, which you must memorise and repeat. You should be questioning things happening around you. Even a dripping tap in your house can be interesting, and many complex biological phenomena take place in your garden. Students should be observing things, and the spark of curiosity should not be killed by the school system. We also need labs and places where people have opportunities and encouragement to build their talent. There should be good public libraries, which are still the best repositories of knowledge where one can learn fascinating things.

Scientific institutions also need a different policy. Our institutions have become more and more bureaucratized and centralized, and the system is clogged. Even though there are good people in our institutions, they often underperform in the current system. We need to understand why it is happening and reform our institutional and funding structures. People are trying to bring in some changes with the ANRF (Anusandhan National Research Foundation), but we also have to reform institutions so that scientists have the autonomy to do their science, and are valued and trusted by the funding agency and the public. And, of course, scientists need to be accountable, demonstrating that, given the support, many things can be done. You can hold people accountable in multiple ways, but it is currently being done using very blunt-force instruments. Different structures need to be treated differently.

We should have scientifically strong people leading institutions, and they should be given the freedom to carry out their task. We need to undertake scientific reforms because our systems are still like the systems of the 1980s. It (the current disenfranchisement of scientific institutions in many countries around the world) is a chance for India to actually do things differently and to show that we can be world leaders in science and develop breakthroughs. But we have to provide the right environment and empower people who can bring about that change.

A carnival of kanitam

2025-11-11T00:00:00Z

The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, organized the sixth edition of Kanita Kanagam, a mathematics outreach program for school students, on 17 October 2025. The program had talks by researchers in Tamil and English, and was attended by 150 students from government schools in Chennai. In these interactive lectures and demonstrations, students worked out interesting problems in mathematics.

Games, juggling, and other mathematical tricks

In the first talk of the day, Amritanshu Prasad (Amri) and Viswanath Sankaran from IMSc introduced students to the Monty Hall problem, a paradoxical puzzle in probability. The auditorium took on a game-show air, as the hosts revealed three boxes on stage, one of them concealing a prize unknown to the audience. In the gameplay, a player first guesses a box where the prize may be hidden, following which the host reveals the identity of one of the other two boxes, which does not have the prize. The player is then given a choice of sticking to their first guess or switching their choice. Groups of students took turns to play the game amidst much suspense and cheering, logging their choices and its outcomes. Finally, the game show hosts put on their mathematician hats, and helped students work out the probability of success under the strategies to switch and not to switch.

Amri and Viswananth engage students with a probability puzzle framed around a game-show premise. (Photo: Mani)

Following this, Steven Spallone from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, juggled his way to introduce mathematical modeling of patterns. He explained how a juggling routine can be broken down into its individual moves encoded as a sequence of numbers. These sequences carry information about whether a ball changes hands, how high it is thrown, and how many balls a sequence needs. Steven began with simple juggling routines, with delightful names like cascade, shower, and fountain, while students in the audience decoded the underlying mathematical sequences and tried their hand with juggling balls of their own. Performing routines of increasing complexity, Steven showed how one can test if a sequence is jugglable, the mathematical rules behind building sequences, and combining sequences to produce new routines.

Steven Spallone holds everyone’s attention in his hands, using juggling routines to introduce mathematical sequences. (Photo: Mani)

In the final act of the day, R Balasubramanian (Balu), number theorist and former Director of IMSc, introduced students to modular arithmetic. The lecture began with breaking down familiar calculations involving time on the clock, and ended with the students solving a mind-boggling division problem. Balu began with the question: starting from a given clock reading, how do we calculate the time of the day after a certain number of hours have passed? This calculation involves modular arithmetic, a system of arithmetic for integers in which numbers “wrap around” after a reset value, which shares some properties with regular arithmetic. Using these properties, Balu set the students to find the remainder when 7¹⁷⁶, a very large number with 149 digits, is divided by 11. The auditorium buzzed with excitement as Balu, prompted by the students, magically solved this seemingly impossible problem using only the blackboard and a piece of chalk.

Balu helps students solve a mind-boggling division problem using only the blackboard and a piece of chalk. (Photo: Mani)

The origins of Kanita Kanagam

Kanita Kanagam evolved from an outreach program for school students that began in 2013. The name of this program, One percent, was inspired by Thomas Edison’s famous quote - “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration,” explains KN Raghavan, retired mathematics faculty at IMSc.

During this time, the institute was developing outreach programs at all levels, aimed at schools and colleges, and catering to both students and teachers. Just the previous year, IMSc celebrated Srinivasa Ramanujan’s 125th birthday by hosting a workshop for undergraduate and postgraduate students funded by the science academies. This inspired an annual mathematics outreach program for college students, which changed names and formats over the years before arriving in its current avatar as FACETS. Parallel to these student-oriented programs, there were two long-running annual workshops for teachers from high schools and colleges, aimed at enriching mathematics education.

The first One Percent workshop was co-organized by Raghavan along with former IMSc faculty Parameswaran Sankaran, and the registrations were open to all schools across Chennai. The inaugural program featured lectures in English on geometry, combinatorics and partitions, and a discussion on careers in mathematics. The program continued for the next three years, with several IMSc faculty helping in its organisation.

Rajeeva Karandikar, former Director of Chennai Mathematical Institute, giving out prizes to students during the first edition of One Percent in 2013. (Photo: IMSc Media)

“I truly enjoyed organising One Percent,” says Amri. “The students came from the best schools in Chennai, and were ready to learn everything,” he adds. However, after the first few editions of the program, it was felt that many of the participants already had access to a lot of resources and support from their family and school, which primed them to do well academically. “I proposed, possibly influenced by others, that we run a program in Tamil for students who did not have access to fancy books and coaching classes.”

This was met with a lot of enthusiasm from other faculty, and Kanita Kanagam was born. “Kanita Kanagam can be translated as forest of mathematics but is also a reference to the village Kanagam (now swallowed up by the metropolis of Chennai), which was the nearest human habitation when IMSc was built,” explains Amri. “Jam [R Ramanujam, retired IMSc faculty] already had contacts within the school education department,” he adds, which helped in reaching out to the city’s government schools.

The first Kanita Kanagam took place on 23 October 2017, featuring lectures on math visualization, predicting new theorems, and the connections between different fields of mathematics. “The format has evolved over the years to include more activities. We have tried origami, games and juggling,” says Amri. The program also covers the application of mathematics to various other disciplines. “We’ve had talks by physicists, electrical engineers, and the like, which are really eye-opening,” adds Viswanath.

The first edition of Kanita Kanagam had lectures by researchers from institutions across Chennai. (Photo: IMSc Outreach)

“Initially, we would individually visit local government schools and government-aided schools and request them to send students to the program,” says Varuni P from IMSc Outreach. “Now, we go through the Tamil Nadu State Council of Educational Research and Training, who are very enthusiastic about these outreach programs,” she adds. “Varuni has been invaluable to the organization of One Percent and Kanita Kanagam from the very beginning,” says Amri. Manikandan (Mani) Sambasivam, her colleague from the outreach group, has joined these efforts in the last few editions. They are involved in brainstorming ideas for talks, helping with props, coordinating with schools, and event organization.

Discovering the joy of doing mathematics

When mathematics is taught in schools and colleges, students are trained to answer a question by fitting it to what they know, often plugging in a formula to find a solution. This does not allow students to appreciate the wonder and beauty of questions, says Raghavan. “Mathematics research is a lot of fun, and there are many unanswered questions that one can explore. Many people don’t realise that there is a lot of research to be done in mathematics, and that it is important,” he adds.

“Kanita Kanagam tries to address the playful, explorative, and open-ended nature of mathematics,” says Viswanath. “We try to convey to students the feeling of what it means to do mathematics, that it is a creative pursuit,” says Amri. “Our school education doesn’t give us an opportunity to do these things. If students experience this, they will realise that mathematics is fun,” adds Raghavan.

Students exploring geometric shapes using origami in the 2018 edition of Kanita Kanagam. (Photo: IMSc Media)

“Both of the talks I’ve done at Kanita Kanagam are very different from the regular math curriculum,” says Vijay Ravikumar, a faculty from Azim Premji University who has been closely associated with mathematics outreach at IMSc. In the past years, he has presented talks on 'Untangling a knot, with numbers' and 'Finding the lost bicycle'.

In the bicycle problem, the central question is to determine the direction in which a bicycle has traveled using the geometry of its tracks. “We even made a little skit in the beginning of the lecture,” says Vijay, who is also a performance artist. Later, students came up on stage and made more tracks by riding a cycle with painted tyres. “The idea was to nudge them to come up with lots of different ideas about how one might figure out the solution,” says Vijay.

“Some people have discomfort engaging with math through abstract symbols. These activities break away from that and allow people to engage with the same math, but in a more direct way through physical objects or more visual means,” explains Vijay. “It is fun to engage with math in this more tactile way.”

In Vijay’s Ravikumar’s talk, students looked at geometric clues in cycle tracks to trace a missing bicycle. (Photo: IMSc Media)

Over the years, the program has also tried to introduce students to the various opportunities and career paths in mathematics that may be unknown to many. “We once had a lecture by Prof Andrew Thangaraj from IIT Madras, where he spoke about coding theory, and also about the opportunities for higher learning afforded by the online degree programs at IIT Madras,” recalls Viswanath. “The students had numerous questions about both, and it was a very engaging session.”

Such engagement also helps bridge the gap between students and scientists, according to Mani. He recalls how students flocked to speak with Shrihari Gopalakrishna, physics faculty at IMSc, soon after his talk on fundamental particles in the 2023 edition of Kanita Kanagam. “That image has somehow stayed with me,” he says.

IMSc members engage in a panel discussion on careers in mathematics in the 2023 edition of Kanita Kanagam. From left to right: Amritanshu Prasad, Namratha Aravind (post-doctoral fellow in mathematics), Venkatesh Raman (faculty in theoretical computer science, S Velmurugan (PhD student in mathematics), and Viswanath Sankaran. (Photo: IMSc Media)

To mathematicians, giving talks to school children, far from their usual academic audience, can be both fulfilling and demanding. “It is a challenge to start from scratch, to assume nothing and engage with students. You have to be very careful about not going too fast,” says Raghavan. “It is an opportunity for me to learn something new and experiment with ways of presenting it in an engaging fashion,” says Viswanath. Vijay does this by reframing ideas from well-known talks to a local context, and making it theatrical. “Part of the joy of doing mathematics is also in communicating mathematics. It is exciting when you find a way to engage with very deep mathematics with a much wider audience,” he says.

“At the end of an hour, you would have said something significant. Maybe you touched upon some important problem, all the better if it is an open problem,” explains Raghavan. “Once students see and grasp something that was difficult just a while ago, they are thrilled. It is very rewarding.”

Shrihari Gopalakrishna interacting with students after his talk on fundamental particles. (Photo: Mani)

Remembering PPD

2025-11-03T00:00:00Z

Occasionally, individuals appear who leave a deep impression on the members of an academic institution without ever having any formal association with it. IMSc has been particularly lucky in having a number of such visitors, especially during the years when Balu led the institution. Several of them had been invited as guest faculty at the Chennai Mathematics Institute (CMI), which was yet to shift to its own premises. Balu had graciously arranged for their accommodation at IMSc Guest House, as a result of which we got the benefit of stalwarts such as Prof HS Mani being present on our campus over extended periods.

However, of all of them, the one who probably had the deepest influence on my thinking and also became a close personal friend was Puthan Purayil Divakaran, who insisted that all his friends (who could range from ages 9 to 90) call him PPD. I have often read about personalities who are ‘larger than life’ – PPD was among the very few people I have seen for whom this description fit like a glove. You could feel his immense joie de vivre even from the way he would stride across the campus on his way from the academic block to the guest house for joining the evening tea “ritual” that a small group of the physics faculty members (which included Rahul Basu, Ghanashyam Date and Gautam Menon, to mention a few of the regular members) would indulge in at 5:30 pm.

The topics in this evening “small talk” would range from bemoaning the fate of undergraduates who would want to discuss string theory but could not solve simple problems involving Newton’s laws of motion, to discussing a book that has just been profiled in the New York Review of Books. PPD was easily one of the most eloquent voices – his range of knowledge spanning mathematical physics (his area of specialization) to Indian temple design, a passion which I learnt later he had shared with his art historian wife, Odile, and whom he accompanied on research visits to medieval-era South Asian art sites.

I had little overlap with PPD academically. He had been a high-energy physicist at TIFR Bombay, from where he had retired in 1996. However, given his breadth of interests and gregarious nature, we soon found ourselves discussing various scientific topics, especially when he began to deliver a course of lectures on the history of mathematics at CMI. This was also the time when, by a curious set of coincidences, IMSc became a center of research on deciphering the inscriptions found at various sites of the Indus civilization. At the time, PPD and I had begun to attend the monthly lectures organized by our neighbouring institute, the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL), which housed the Indus Research Center. It was set up as a repository of the archives of Iravatham Mahadevan and to also carry forward his pioneering work on epigraphy.

It turned out that PPD knew Mahadevan quite well, as the latter had been at TIFR in the late 1970s, where he had prepared his famous concordance of Indus inscriptions (which is now publicly available online through the RMRL curated site Indus Script. Helped by PPD’s introduction, Mahadevan was soon convinced (despite his initial protestations about “What can I say that mathematicians may want to hear”) to give a public talk at IMSc. It coincided with a visit by Mayank Vahia from TIFR Bombay, an astronomer who had become interested in ancient artifacts recording astronomical events (an area known as archaeo-astronomy). This made him interested in the figures inscribed on the Indus seals, and we soon had a small but enthusiastic band at the Institute discussing various aspects of the Indus civilization.

PPD was at this time already studying the origins of mathematics in the subcontinent. He was going through the Sulbasutras, the earliest mathematical text of South Asia dating back to the Vedic period, which primarily focused on the geometry of altar constructions for performing rituals. However, as PPD and I went through the pictorial databases of the Indus seals and pottery designs, we soon realized that many of the basic geometric constructions mentioned in the Vedic Sutras, such as the construction of a perfect square by the use of circles, must have already been known to the Indus civilization.

PPD’s later interest in Indian mathematics broadened to include the medieval era. As he gradually began focusing on the Kerala School of Mathematics that flourished between the 14th and 16th centuries and its pioneering figure Madhava, PPD became curious about the antecedents of what we now know as calculus. Being the rational scholar that he was, he refused to reduce his findings to simplistic, headline-grabbing rhetoric such as “Indians invented calculus centuries before Newton and Leibniz.” He was impervious to the politics of populist jingoism that has gradually pervaded Indian academia over the last decades. Rather, he came up with a very nuanced picture of what the scholars of the Kerala School had managed to achieve, presented brilliantly in his magnum opus The Mathematics of India (Springer, 2018). As he has made clear in his book and lectures, even if not immediately recognizable as the calculus of Newton and Leibniz, the work of these scholars is no less worthy of our appreciation.

Much of PPD’s later work that culminated in his 2018 book was done in the seclusion of his study in his Kochi apartment, where he spent the last decade and a half, barring occasional trips to academic institutes and conferences. On my occasional trips to Kochi, whenever I called PPD, he immediately invited me to visit, going so far as to arrange a car for traveling back and forth from his house. In his book-lined study, he would talk about what he was working on at the time, asking about goings on at IMSc and how our studies on the Indus inscriptions were moving forward. He would go on to give detailed reading suggestions to clear any doubts I may have mentioned about the development of mathematics.

He wore his enormous erudition lightly, never coming across as showing off but as a friend who guides you gently to some nugget of knowledge (a guru in the truest sense of the word, although I am not sure if PPD would have liked being referred to as one).

When I met him last in December 2022, he not only insisted on a meeting at his house and dinner afterwards, but also took us out the next morning to see the archaeological excavations at Pattanam, which has been identified as the port of Muziris referred to in Roman sources. On the way there, a discussion on the possible numbering system used by the Indus people somehow turned into a question about the first written evidence for a symbol indicating zero. PPD, in his usual manner, did not reduce it to a single sentence answer (for example, I have heard some immediately respond to this question with the statement “Bakshali manuscript”), but instead pointed out the question’s complexity to me, given the uncertainty of dates ascribed to the manuscripts, and how we may have to resort to epigraphic sources that clearly mention a regnal date. I remember this particularly because it so nicely encapsulates what for me was PPD’s quintessential style of discussion, that taught so much.

Earlier this year, when I had occasion to visit Kochi, I had called him – expecting yet another evening of delightful discussions. However, the voice at the other end no longer had the confident, jovial ring, pulsating with life, that I had always taken for granted. Haltingly, PPD explained to me that he had not been keeping well for some time and had just moved to an assisted care facility. He expressed hopes of seeing me again sometime in the near future when he was better. That was not to be as he passed away on 23^rd August.

What would always remain with those whose lives he touched is the joy he exuded in learning and the magnanimity with which he shared his knowledge. In India, especially, retirement from an academic institution (and occasionally much earlier than that) is usually equated with intellectual atrophy. PPD showed me how one can begin a completely new chapter in their scholarly journey post-retirement, all the more so, by becoming one of the pre-eminent authorities on the topic. He lived the oft-heard but seldom practised motto of “Never stop learning.” Would that everyone were as fortunate!

A day of fun and discovery at IMSc's Open Day

2025-10-27T00:00:00Z

The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, welcomed school students and the general public on its annual Open Day held on 12th September. PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, staff and faculty at the Institute came together to organise the event, featuring talks, experiments and demonstrations. Over 450 visitors, including 8-12 standard students and teachers from government schools around Chennai and members of the general public, explored various activities spread across the campus. There were simple experiments that could be recreated at home, engaging games and demonstrations, interactive talks by IMSc faculty, and a tour of the Institute’s public library. Students invited from government schools returned home with popular science books in English and Tamil at the end of the event.

Photo: Anuran Pal

Photo: Akshay Sanjeev

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Varuni P

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Bharti Dharapuram

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Abhinav Viswaroop

Photo: Varuni P

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Bharti Dharapuram

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Abhinav Viswaroop

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Abhinav Viswaroop

Photo: Varuni P

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Abhinav Viswaroop

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Bharti Dharapuram

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Varuni P

Photo: Abhinav Viswaroop

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Bharti Dharapuram

Photo: Abhinav Viswaroop

Photo: Aysha Mahira

Photo: Bharti Dharapuram

Photo: Akshay Sanjeev

Photo: Bharti Dharapuram

Photo: Manikandan Sambasivam

Photo: Akshay Sanjeev

Photo: Varuni P

A mob of babble-rousers

2025-10-24T00:00:00Z

There are around sixteen species of babblers in India, of which jungle babblers and yellow-billed babblers are common in southern India. They are even seen in cities, moving around in noisy groups, hopping on the ground and lower branches of trees. They are greyish-brown in colour and scruffy, but what they lack in looks they make up in character.

Babblers create a ruckus wherever they go, pecking, poking and turning things over on the ground and constantly chattering amongst themselves. It is not surprising then that their genus name, Argya, is derived from the Latin word argutus, for noisy. Babblers hop from one spot to another looking for food, insects, plant material and food scraps, taking short, low flights from one tree to another. Usually, one of the birds in the group acts as a sentinel, looking out for predators, while the others are busy foraging. And when they spot an intruder, like a cat, owl or a snake, a frenzy follows. The birds gather together, giving a loud cacophony of alarm calls, beating their wings in short flaps, relentlessly mobbing the intruder till it retreats.

Among the many babbler species, one can easily get confused between the jungle babbler (Argya striata) and the yellow-billed babbler (Argya affinis), which overlap in their distribution in southern India. The yellow-billed babbler has a pale whitish cap on its head, pale blue eyes and a gradient of grey in its plumage, which darkens at the ends of its feathers. While the yellow-billed babbler prefers drier and open habitats and has a restricted range limited to southern India, jungle babblers occur in more wooded areas and are distributed across the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka. Both species may co-occur around areas with human habitation such as parks and gardens. They can also be told apart by their calls, and one often hears babblers before seeing them.

Research on jungle babbler calls from the Behavioural Ecology Lab at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali has found a wide repertoire of vocalizations, each produced in a specific context. Jungle babblers produce 15 distinct calls, about half of which are used while in distress or when responding to threats. Agonistic calls are more similar to each other in the notes they contain and their organization, and quite distinct from calls used in more cooperative social situations. Put simply, jungle babbler calls are context-specific, where the structure of a call appears to be closely associated with its function. The sophisticated vocal repertoire of jungle babblers resembles that of other cooperative breeders, where young are raised by a larger social group.

Looking into the social organization of jungle babblers, a study from the seventies by the English ecologist AJ Gaston found that roles and behaviours within a group are ordered based on age and dominance. However, unlike other social birds, jungle babblers don’t appear to use aggression to establish their status. Instead, social play is common, especially in birds less than a year old. Gaston suggests that these bouts of play in young birds may determine their social status later in life. He notes some delightful details about their frolic: “Rough and tumble behaviour consisted of two or more birds engaging in a mock fight in which some lay on the ground more or less passively, while others rolled on top of them, or pecked them deliberately but gently…Mad flights consisted of one or several birds flying rapidly and apparently aimlessly among the branches of a tree, twisting and turning in acrobatic manoeuvres.”

On the IMSc campus, I have often seen yellow-billed babblers near the Ramanujan auditorium, among the trees near the football ground, in bushes around the herb garden near the canteen, and shrubs and trees behind the flatlets. They occur in groups of six or more (jungle babblers are called "seven sisters") and are easy to spot because of their conspicuous calls and activity.

Following Fish by Samanth Subramanian

2025-10-15T00:00:00Z

In 1967, the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot wrote the influential paper, How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. Mandelbrot’s paper starts with a figure reproduced from Lewis Fry Richardson’s work on the relationship between border lengths of neighbouring countries and the probability of war. The figure reproduced in Mandelbrot’s paper illustrates the coastline paradox — that the length of the coastline depends on the size of the ruler used to measure it.

Imagine yourself as a young researcher venturing to measure the coastline of India. If you are traveling on foot, you are going to get hungry, and fish is as good a food option as any in coastal India. After traveling through the nine coastal states, you may decide to give up the idea of adding another dataset to Richardson’s figure and instead write about your travels. The resulting book would not be too dissimilar from Samanth Subramanian’s book Following Fish. It is a travelogue covering the Indian coastline in a clockwise manner — starting from West Bengal in the Bay of Bengal coast and ending in Gujarat off the Arabian Sea.

What I like about the book is that each chapter is sufficiently independent in theme and can be read in any order. Like any good travelogue, the book is rich in anecdotes and observations. This is how Samanth tries to weave together football and food in two sentences in the first chapter On hunting the hilsa and mastering its bones: “The hilsa can be a symbol of Bengali identity, but also of the sibling rivalry between East and West Bengal. It participates in another rivalry as well: A hilsa dinner is a tradition for fans of the East Bengal football team when it wins, just as prawns are for fans of Mohun Bagan.”

The Kerala chapter, aptly titled On an Odyssey through toddy shops, is more about toddy culture and less about fish. But they do mingle together in this almost farcical description of kappa-meen curry: “But the staple of every toddy shop is its kappa-meen curry combination. The kappa—bland, steamed lumps of tapioca, tempered with coconut and chillies—is such dense starch that, according to the laws of physics, light should not be able to escape it. It would be inedible without its thin, oil-slicked fish curry that, in happy symbiosis, would in turn be inedible without the kappa. All toddy shop meen curries come furiously red with industrial dosages of chilli powder.”

In spite of the generally pleasant and anecdotal tone of the book, it manages to touch on some serious subjects. The chapter on Goa titled On grieving for bygone beaches and fish is about Goa’s environmental and economic situation. As one local comments to the author, “‘...if a fisherman who earns Rs 100 a day can sell his land for Rs 10 lakhs, start a lease-a-motorbike service, make Rs 1,000 a day by renting out five motorcycles, and sit at home all day playing cards and drinking, who wouldn’t do it?” While local fishermen are giving up fishing, Goa’s waters are overfished by trawling and longline fishing by fishermen coming in from other regions.

Surprisingly, I found the introduction and the afterword more insightful than the main body of the book. Because they answer the ‘Why’ questions as opposed to the ‘What’ and ‘How’. The introduction reveals that the writer of the book didn’t touch fish till his early 20s after a regretful first encounter in his childhood. Naturally, Samanth thinks of himself as the ideal person to write a book about fish, assuming that distance gives him objectivity. I disagree. I don’t think that distance brings a nuanced perspective when it comes to food habits.

A more convincing answer to the question ‘Why travel around the coast of India?’ can be found in the afterword:

“A place is always hotter or wetter or colder or drier than you suspect it will be; people will always turn out to have stories different from the ones you set out to hear; a society will, when you think you’ve got it all figured out, always turn itself inside-out like a sock, to reveal its frayed threads, its seams, its patterns of stitch work.”

“The real process of discovery works not by revealing things you knew nothing about, but by revealing how wrong you were about what you did know. The standard India story rightly emphasizes the gamut of differences from one state to the next. What struck me more, however, were the similarities of the coastal communities I visited, right around the country. A fisherman in Tamil Nadu looked very much like a fisherman in Gujarat, as slender as a mast and scorched dry by sun and salt.”

That is as good a goal to travel around the coast of any country as measuring the coastline to settle border disputes.

The making of a children's science magazine

2025-10-14T00:00:00Z

“It was a small community and a very vibrant place,” D Indumathi (Indu) says about her time as a PhD student at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai in the late eighties and the early nineties. “The whole institute used to get together for dinner parties on the old building terrace. All of us students used to meet up, chatting until late, discussing all kinds of things,” says Indu, who recently retired as a faculty in theoretical physics from IMSc.

Discussions like these sowed the seeds for Jantar Mantar, a children’s science magazine published by the Tamil Nadu Science Forum for the last thirty-two years.

“It was a very aspirational time in the nineties. The markets were opening up and people wanted to learn English. They wanted access to material which was not very difficult for children to read,” says Indu. As part of the Tamil Nadu Science Forum, students and faculty at IMSc, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) had also been interacting with people’s science networks across different states. They wanted to write articles in English that could potentially be translated into other languages. At this time, the Forum was already bringing out Thulir, a very popular Tamil children’s science magazine. However, many students and faculty at IMSc and IIT Madras couldn’t communicate in Tamil, but were enthusiastic about contributing articles in English.

When ideas around Jantar Mantar were taking shape, Thulir, a children's science magazine in Tamil by TNSF had already been around for a few years gaining popularity (Image: Thulir webpage).

Many of them recognised how popular science writing had shaped their own early interest in science. “When I was a kid in the seventies, I got inspired to become a scientist by popular science books like One, Two, Three…Infinity by George Gamow and Brighter Than a Thousand Suns by Robert Jungk, and a magazine called Science Today,” says R Shankar, retired professor in theoretical physics from IMSc, about his early influences. “I grew up with Kumar, a Gujarati magazine, which also extended to the arts. I remember reading my first Feluda stories by Satyajit Ray there,” says Kamal Lodaya, retired IMSc professor in theoretical computer science, who has been writing for Jantar Mantar since its very first edition. “It shaped my desire to learn more and become a scientist,” he adds.

“We had a long meeting one evening,” says Basheer Ahmed, who has been associated with the design and layout of Jantar Mantar right from the beginning. “We had a discussion about the name of the magazine, periodicity, number of pages, content, etc. We finalised the name Jantar Mantar,” he adds. “The magazine has a byline ‘Children’s Science Observatory’, because we wanted to have articles that encouraged children to do experiments,” Indu explains. “The early editions had a lot of articles about how things work and how to do experiments.” The magazine’s logo was designed by Ranjan De from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. In the mid- and late 1990s, the IIT Madras group of Sunil Kumar, Archana Ghode, Abhijit Deshpande and Susy Varughese were actively involved in all aspects of the magazine, from contributing articles to editing and publishing the magazine.

Writing for children is no child’s play. “It is important to keep the sentences short and use simple English. Scientists are really bad at writing simply because we want to be accurate and are not used to writing for children,” she explains. To Indu, the nature of the message and the tone in which it is being conveyed are also important. “Nuances are very hard to communicate when it is not a one-on-one conversation where things can be discussed in detail,” she says about the challenges of the written medium. “I like to tell children about issues like climate change and pollution, but not in a doomsday-like scenario,” she stresses. “I think you should give them some hope, always.”

In the early years, students and faculty running Jantar Mantar would meet regularly at one of their houses. “We would decide what would be in the next issue, what articles we already have, and if we need to fill in any gaps,” recalls Indu. Some columns like Nature’s Diary, Science News, a science quiz called Do You Know? and a maze, Find the way!, recur in each issue. Most other articles vary from issue to issue and are written by a pool of contributors.

Vikram, an elephant from Mudumalai, and his friend Lakshmi discuss physics in a series of articles written by former IMSc faculty R Shankar. In this illustration by former student Madhushree Basu, Lakshmi explains a parabola to Vikram. (Image from JM60)

“My contributions have not been related to my research,” says Shankar, something that is common across researchers writing for Jantar Mantar. Shankar really enjoyed writing a series of articles about an elephant (Vikram) and a young girl (Lakshmi) exploring science, and also created crossword puzzles for the magazine. Fictional characters like Vikram and Lakshmi not only generate curiosity but can also be a means of showcasing diversity. S Krishnaswamy, retired professor from Madurai Kamaraj University and visiting faculty at IMSc, writes articles with the characters Zareena, Mookayi and Mari, girls from different backgrounds in Madurai. “These articles have been fun to write as the setting and the conversations between them need to be imagined,” he says.

Many authors find joy in learning things outside of their discipline. “I have written on almost all topics in the sciences and humanities. I particularly like writing articles where I myself get to learn something. My favourite articles are about how a subject changes,” says Kamal. He has often written about subjects that he disliked in school, such as history and organic chemistry. Gautam Menon, former IMSc faculty now at Ashoka University, Sonipat, has written about the origin of life, climate change and soft matter physics. One of his favourite articles, Eggsperiments with the Archimedes Principle, is about buoyancy. “I wrote it after a visit to Israel and the Dead Sea, to check if eggs would float in water of such high salinity,” Gautam says. On one of Indu’s travels, she came across a book on memory that completely fascinated her. “I worked on an article on memory for a very long time and it was difficult to write. I have written three more articles on the subject,” she says.

Other articles in Jantar Mantar are very topical. Since its first appearance, an article on elections by R Ramanujam, retired IMSc faculty in theoretical computer science, has been republished in the magazine before every major election. He uses simple examples to explain the different systems of elections around the world, illustrating their advantages and drawbacks. In November each year, the magazine also publishes a series of articles covering the Nobel Prize following the announcements in October, many of them written by MVN Murthy, also a former professor at IMSc. He has also written two-part articles on topics such as geographic coordinate systems and the periodic table.

In the early years of the magazine, once all the articles were written, it would take a couple of weeks for Basheer to finish the design and layout before printing copies. Today, it takes less than a week. “When I came into the field, magazine articles were given as handwritten manuscripts,” he says. “Hand composing, monotype and linotype composing were vanishing slowly and phototypesetting was in its initial stages. The text was typed using a computer and printed on photographic paper, which was used to create the layout manually,” he explains. “Then came laser typesetting and laser printers, which were much cheaper. Only those who were able to adapt to those tools were able to survive.”

“In the beginning, Madhavan [Madhavan Mukund, now faculty at CMI] and Kamal took care of the layout, and Deepak [Deepak Khemani from IIT Madras] did most of the illustrations,” says Basheer. Indu remembers them physically placing photographs within the text to create the layout. “We would go around searching for photographs that could go alongside the articles,” she recalls. “We did not have access to the kind of material available today. It was a very different world.” In the nineties, RK Laxman allowed them to publish some of his cartoons for a small fee and they appeared as a series. Other members at IMSc contributed illustrations. “I had been doodling, but this was the first time that I did illustrations for a science article,” says Madhushree Basu, former IMSc student who started her journey as a science illustrator with Shankar’s Vikram-Lakshmi series.

Release of the special edition of Jantar Mantar celebrating 60 years of IMSc (January 2023). Photo: IMSc Media

For a magazine running on voluntary article contributions for over three decades, Jantar Mantar has seen its share of challenges. “It is a lot of work to bring out the magazine, and can be difficult since this is not the primary job of most people contributing to it,” says Indu. “The magazine would be in flux when people left to other places, and couldn't contribute when they got busy or pulled out of the magazine,” she explains. Another challenge is related to its distribution. Indu explains that people in cities with access to the internet may not want to buy Jantar Mantar, and fewer English medium schools in rural areas limit the magazine’s reach. Distributing the magazine through newsagents for a wider reach would shoot up its price and make it unaffordable to many. “We have always been beholden to IMSc, for the IMSc 60 and JM 25 issues,” says Indu, about IMSc’s support in bringing out special issues celebrating 60 years of IMSc and 25 years of Jantar Mantar.

“I would be happy if it had more of a pan-India presence. I think there is a need for it. A lot of children aspire to read in English, and this is useful information,” says Indu. “There are very few science magazines aimed at those who are school-aged that use examples from India and the sorts of colloquialisms and informal language that are common to us. What exists often lacks local context and significance,” says Gautam. “Magazines which convey information about the world in a light but reasoned way, yet manage to challenge the reader, are very important to students,” says Kamal. “They teach them how to tackle learning.”

Pooja Saxena: The curator of signs

2025-09-23T00:00:00Z

What got you interested in design and typography?

Growing up, my parents were equally encouraging of both the arts and the sciences. My Dad is an engineer and does sculpture and my Mom is a teacher who studied music, and both of them paint. It was an ideal setup to grow up in, because they were supportive of whatever I wanted to do. Even when it came to choosing a career, I was interested in disparate things. I was like, I could do design, or I could do law, or I could become a chef. And I ended up choosing design. In the very first year of college, there was an interesting assignment which asked us to imagine the future of something. For whatever reason, I chose to work on the future of printing technology and fonts. That became my ‘in’ into type design. At the time, I had no idea that it was even a profession, but I felt like this might be something that I can pay more attention to. I really enjoy that type design is about visuals and drawing, but it also involves a fair amount of research and my work requires very simple programming. So in some ways, it lets me do a few different things that I've always enjoyed doing.

What does your day look like as a typeface designer?

I've had many different kinds of jobs within the field of type design over the last decade and a half. There was a time when I was spending a day or a day and a half of my week writing documentation for a typeface design tool. In the past, I have also done more dedicated research work. Quite recently, in my work with TypeTogether, on a research project called Primarium about how Latin script handwriting is taught in primary schools in different countries and communities around the world. That project involved a lot of research, writing, editing, and interviewing people. In the weeks and months that I'm actually drawing type, like now, it is a painfully and wonderfully iterative process. You draw some letters, and then you see if they work well with each other, and then you draw them again, repeating the process till you're happy with how the letter forms work with each other. Typefaces are not about a few nice-looking letters— those letters have to work well in longer text. It can't just be a nice-looking T, which looks really awkward with everything else. And that holds true for every single letter that you are drawing.

Pooja working on a custom Gurmukhi logotype for a multilingual sign. Read more

I focus on drawing in Indic scripts, specifically Devanagari, but also a bit of Gurmukhi and Gujarati, which tend to have a much larger number of letters, marks, vowel marks and conjuncts. It often involves research into how certain letter forms may have been drawn in the past, looking at the kinds of decisions taken by people, or solving technical problems in the present. People expect fonts to look a certain way, so as a type designer, while you can be adventurous, you have to be adventurous in a very sensitive way. Research ends up being a really, really important part of the process.

Pooja spent a year drawing the letter ‘ka’ in Devanagari in a different style each week, drawing inspiration from various places.

In your talk, you mentioned that when you started documenting public signs, you came to it from a feeling of scarcity. Can you say a bit more?

I went to study type design at the typography department in the University of Reading, which at the time was among the two or three places in the world where you could study it. They have an archive that contains a lot of material about how typefaces for Indic scripts were produced in the last century or so. The British Library also has archives from their colonies, at a scale that the colonies themselves don't have, and one got very used to being able to see this material. But when I moved back to India, it suddenly felt like resources to study letter forms had shrunk. Libraries and archives are notoriously challenging to access in this country, especially if you're not affiliated with an educational institution in the capacity of a researcher. So I started looking at what kind of materials I could manufacture access to, and street lettering became one of those things. I had access to it and, I realized, it was just a matter of looking at it from the right perspective to start using it as research material.

In sign painting, the constraints of letterpress printing and typeface design don’t exist because you can draw whatever you want. Technological limitations like how many characters a font can have, or how base characters and marks can attach are non-existent. Not to mention, instead of a system, you’re designing a single artefact. For example, in Hindi, Bengali or Gurmukhi the text hangs from the headline almost like a clothesline from which letters are hanging. But if you look at street lettering, the headline can be curved. When you look at material produced through non-mainstream reproduction technologies, you start to see the possibilities of how letterforms in our scripts can look. That became something that was really interesting to me.

Handpainted sign on a food cart in Udaipur with a curved headline.

Architectural lettering with a curved headline on a building in Haridwar.

You spoke about local histories and personal stories behind public signs in your talk. How do you explore these deeper layers in your work?

I think one of the things that I am very curious about when I'm looking at a sign is, why is this language here. Following that curiosity leads to interesting answers in most cases. For example, in Delhi's Paharganj, why do I see Hebrew? If I'm in Bangalore, why does Kannada start to appear in public signs? Why do I see broken looking Hindi everywhere I go? It is questions like these, which often tell you a lot about a place itself, the people who are using it but also the people who are being prioritized in that space. I think the question, more often than not, has an uncomfortable answer, but I think it is a question worth asking.

Bilingual sign with wooden English lettering and handpainted Kannada lettering in Bangalore.

Another really interesting thing I note within a neighbourhood or a city is the signature of the painter or the painting company on the bottom right of painted signs. Within a neighbourhood or a city, I try to find as many signs by the same painter. One, that may lead to a conversation with them, and two, it gives me the opportunity to basically look at a neighbourhood or a city as basically a gallery of someone's work. It's a little bit like, if you live in Chandigarh and you go and identify all the buildings that Le Corbusier designed, then you can think of Chandigarh as a living gallery of Corbusier's work. Sign makers and painters actually have an important role to play in what our cities look like and they're usually anonymous. Even if their name is signed, nobody's paying any attention to it. I like to be able to acknowledge who is deciding what the city looks like. I think this has really changed the experience of how I see a city.

Handpainted sign by Deena Arts on a hardware shop in George Town, Chennai.

Another one of many signs in the area made by the same sign maker.

Public signs are pretty much everywhere around us. But why do you think we don’t notice or appreciate them enough?

I think it's a couple of things about where we believe our appreciation is deserved and where it's not. One is that we think of signs as functional objects. And very often, when we think of something as functional, we don't really appreciate it for its aesthetic value. And two, it's not just that we don’t expect art to be in public places, but it's also about what we expect art to look like. It's our misguided relationship with taste that we think certain things deserve to be kind of elevated to art or appreciation. And that is exactly why I like to say that I could think of a neighbourhood as a gallery of the sign painter’s work. It is to kind of remind people that this is equally valid as artistic expression that deserves appreciation.

How did the idea for your upcoming book India Street Lettering come about?

I had been trying to think of different ways in which I can share my archive of street lettering photographs with people, and in 2022-2023, I started making small zines about the subject. As it turned out, people actually wanted them, which was a lovely surprise. During this time, Rakesh Khanna from Blaft Publications asked if I would be open to selling these on their website. And if I’d considered making it into a book? We got talking and decided that it would be great to do a book together.

The book is organised by the different kinds of establishments that have signs, and will feature photographs from my archive, some of which are over a decade old. I am particularly excited about the chapter about signs on homes, because they're different in not responding to commercial demands that businesses must. The book is going to carry interviews from sign makers and maps of select neighbourhoods from a few cities, highlighting interesting signs from my research. I hope these maps encourage folks to go on their own type explorations. The book is being published by Blaft Publications, and will be out this December. And for those interested, it is up for pre-order.

Tiled sign on an apartment building in Bangalore.

What are some of your favourite signs from Chennai?

Gem & Co, the pen shop near the High Court, is definitely one of my favourites. In and around Triplicane, there is a sign for a store called Advanced Screen Supplies, which sells screen printing supplies. It is a painted sign which is really quite beautiful. The third one is a sign in Parrys Corner, which just says ‘fire engine’. It's a really beautiful tiled sign, where the tiles are almost like pixels. There isn't a fire station there now but there’s bound to be one there at some point and I've been digging into it. Those are my top three.

Wooden signboard of Gem & Co near the High Court, Chennai.

Handpainted sign on a screen supplies shop in Triplicane, Chennai.

Tiled sign for a fire engine in Parrys Corner, Chennai.

All the photographs used in the article are by Pooja Saxena. You can find past issues of her newsletter I spy with my typographic eye and subscribe to it here.

IMSc celebrates as Quantum Mechanics turns 100

2025-09-05T00:00:00Z

The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai (IMSc) joined institutions around the world in celebrating a century of quantum mechanics by organising a conference from 8-12 September 2025. The meeting featured lectures by speakers from a dozen research institutions and covered a broad sweep of topics from the foundations of quantum physics to its emerging applications across disciplines.

The meeting was organised by IMSc faculty Sibasish Ghosh, SR Hassan, Shrihari Gopalakrishna, Roji Pius and V Ravindran with the help of many volunteers.

“Our idea was to give a historical account of the development of quantum mechanics, starting from the 1920s to the present perspective. We had both theoretical and experimental talks. Some of the talks were more pedagogical, while others were a bit more advanced,” says Sibasish Ghosh, a member of the conference’s organizing committee. The lectures were tailored to be accessible to both postgraduates and advanced researchers from diverse fields.

At the end of two conference days, there were panel discussions on special themes. In these, speakers came together to discuss Quantum Information Science and the National Quantum Mission and answered questions from the audience. “The idea was to provide information about current developments, particularly in physics,” says Sibasish.

“One of the important aspects of Quantum Information Science is to see what kind of phenomena can emerge from it in other branches of science,” explains Sibasish. He cites examples of connections between quantum information and diverse fields such as Newtonian gravity, string theory and lattice gauge theory. “These kinds of connections will emerge further,” he says. “One of our goals with the conference was to have a discussion about these emerging phenomena.” The panel also discussed quantum entanglement and its experimental tests and connections between number theory and quantum physics.

The National Quantum Mission was set into motion two years ago to accelerate research and development in quantum technology. “Some of the panelists are playing an important role in the National Quantum Mission. And the goal with the discussion was to understand what we plan to achieve with the mission, what is its current status, and who the players are,” says Sibasish. Panelists discussed the steady and incremental progress in solving diverse problems using quantum computers, security aspects of quantum communication and institutional models that can drive innovation in emerging fields.

The conference also brought together many former IMSc faculty members who have contributed to quantum physics. “When Matscience started in 1962, many of the theoretical physicists here were from high-energy physics. And they had very important contributions, right from the beginning,” says Sibasish. Over the past decades, IMSc has hosted many eminent scientists from around the world whose research has shaped quantum physics. This centennial conference adds to this tradition, showcasing the diversity of quantum physics research from across the country.

Guruprasad Kar (ISI, Kolkata) presented a talk on 'Understanding the Non-local and Contextual Features of Quantum Mechanics.'

Subhash Chaturvedi (IISER-Bhopal) presented a talk on 'Geometric phases for finite state quantum systems, Bargmann invariants, null phase curves...'

Arul Lakshminarayan (IIT Madras) presented a talk on 'Chaos and the Quantum: From Einstein to Quantum Computing.'

B. Ananthanarayan (CHEP, IISc) presented talks on 'Particle Physics Phenomena and Quantum Mechanics' and 'Unpacking the muon g-2.'

Panel discussion on 'Quantum Information Science.'

TS Mahesh (IISER Pune) presented a talk on 'Recent Explorations of Nuclear Spin Dynamics: Unitary, Superposition of unitary, Nonunitary.'

Umakant D Rapol (IISER Pune) presented a talk on 'Quantum Diffusion and Localization in Atom-Optics Kicked Rotor Systems.'

R Shankar (retired IMSc) presented a talk on 'Fractional Statistics.'

Panel discussion on 'Prospects of experimental efforts in India in the field of Quantum Technology in light of the National Quantum Mission.'

Krishnendu Sengupta (IACS Kolkata) presented a talk on 'Ultracold atoms as platforms for dynamics and strong correlation.'

Mandar Deshmukh (TIFR Mumbai) presented a talk on 'Moiré materials for probing Berry curvature physics.'

Vivek Datar (retired BARC Mumbai & TIFR Mumbai) presented a talk on 'Resonances – a case study of 8Be.'

Rita John (Anna University) presented a talk on '169 years legacy of the University of Madras and its academic influence.'

Sandip Trivedi (TIFR Mumbai) presented a talk on 'String Theory: A Quantum Theory of Gravity.'

Aninda Sinha (CHEP, IISc) presented a talk on 'The quantum life of pi.'

Suvrat Raju (ICTS Bengaluru) presented a talk on 'Quantum gravity, locality and the reversibility of time.'

Sachindeo Vaidya (CHEP, IISc) presented a talk on 'Axial Anomaly and Light Hadron Masses in QCD.'

V. Balakrishnan (retired IIT Madras) presented a talk on 'Distances between probability distributions in quantum mechanics and quantum optics.'

Dipanjan Mitra (NCRA Pune) presented a talk on 'Neutron stars as Laboratories for Extreme Physics.'

Rahul Sinha (retired IMSc) presented a talk on 'Bose symmetry and tests of symmetry violations.'

MVN Murthy (retired IMSc) presented a talk on 'Neutrino Physics: A decade of discovery and beyond.'

Ghanashyam Date (retired CMI and IMSc) presented a talk on 'Gravity's resistance to its quantization.'

Mangala Sunder Krishnan (IIT Madras) presented a talk on 'The Story of the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) So Far.'

How city life shapes palm squirrel behaviour

2025-08-26T00:00:00Z

India is home to a remarkable diversity of squirrels, including the familiar tree squirrels, the more cryptic nocturnal flying squirrels, and ground squirrels that are only found in the high reaches of the Himalaya. The group of small palm squirrels—tree squirrels in the genus Funambulus—is especially familiar to people in peninsular India. With their striped backs and distinctive chik-chik calls, they are a part of the everyday soundscape in rural and urban areas. For many of us, these small, agile funambulists are ubiquitous companions—nesting under the tiled roofs of traditional houses, or finding shelter in the exhaust fan vents or air-conditioning units of high-rise apartments. This association of palm squirrels with human habitation is a long-standing one, even finding mention in the ancient Tamil text, the Thirukkural, dated around 2000 years ago. Despite these associations, scientific studies of how palm squirrels navigate today’s rapidly changing landscapes are still in their early stages.

At the Sciurid Lab at IISER Tirupati, we focus on understanding the evolution of palm squirrels, their behavioural responses to change, and their adaptations to life in modern environments. One of our central questions is whether squirrels thrive in cities because urban conditions favour higher densities, or whether their populations are naturally high in all ecosystems.

Palm squirrels are a genus of seven species distributed in South Asia, including India and Sri Lanka. These are small, mouse-sized squirrels that are brown to grey in colour with patterns of stripes on their backs that vary across species. Four species occur in India, while three are found in Sri Lanka. The three-striped palm squirrel, Funambulus palmarum, found in the drier eastern parts of southern India and in Sri Lanka, and is a highly commensal species. We set out to ask whether this species thrives in cities because urban conditions favour higher densities, or whether their populations are uniform across forests, villages, and cities.

To explore this, we conducted a two-year study across a landscape gradient stretching from forests to urban centres around Tirupati, a rapidly growing town in Andhra Pradesh. We had teams of people counting squirrels and characterising their microhabitats in relation to human presence. The results were striking, and we found that squirrel density and abundance increased significantly with urbanisation. However, this came with a caveat—squirrels seemed to occur mostly in areas with specific types of trees, especially commonly planted fruiting and flowering trees in gardens and along roadsides. These include the familiar but often non-native Neem, Prosopis, Pongamia, and Copper pod, among others. We saw similar patterns on the Kodaikanal plateau of the Western Ghats, where the three-striped palm squirrel occurred in high numbers in villages, especially around gardens with planted fruiting and flowering trees.

Living in close quarters with humans seems to change other aspects of squirrel behaviour as well. Urban squirrels were noticeably bolder than those in less disturbed habitats. In a carefully designed food experiment across the forest-to-urban gradient, we offered squirrels both familiar and novel food items, including processed human foods. Urban squirrels approached novel foods more quickly, consumed greater amounts of processed items, and even showed a preference for high-fat foods. In contrast, rural squirrels were more cautious and selective. We also saw this same preference for fatty foods in an observational study around Tirupati, where we measured nutritional content of foods eaten by squirrels - urban squirrels would gravitate to fat-rich foods (like chips and payasam) in garbage dumps. There was also more social interaction between squirrels in urban areas, and shyer animals would follow bolder individuals that were exploring new food items. Our findings so far suggest that the urban lifestyle not only shifts their dietary choices and risk-taking behaviours, but possibly also their social interactions.

What does this tell us more broadly? First, it highlights the remarkable flexibility of some palm squirrel species in adapting to human-dominated landscapes; a pattern that is seen in many species the world over. Commonly denoted as ‘Urban Adapters’, these adaptable species might have traits like boldness, sociability, and a willingness to experiment with new foods which may be key to their success in foreign habitats. Second, it emphasises that urban environments are evolutionary arenas. Just as humans are reshaping landscapes, cities are reshaping the animals that live within them.

Further reading:

Squirrels: The Animal Answer Guide, Richard W Thorington Jr and Katie Ferrell, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2006.

Other Sciurids by Aparajita Datta and Nandini Rajamini in Mammals of South Asia (Volume 2), edited by AJT Johnsingh and Nima Manjrekar, Universities Press, Hyderabad, 2015.

Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution, Menno Schilthuizen, Picador USA, 2019.

Of signs, symbols, and the written word

2025-08-06T00:00:00Z

The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) recently hosted ScriptTalk, a public event consisting of a series of talks and exhibitions showcasing various aspects of scripts, signs, imprints and inscriptions. The event took place between 21-23 July and was organized by Sitabhra Sinha, Md Izhar Ashraf and Nandini Mitra from the IMSc Computational Epigraphy Lab (iCEL).

“The event was planned as a general introduction about various aspects of scripts,” says Sitabhra, who is a faculty member at IMSc. “Many programs organised by iCEL, like the annual Bits & Scripts workshop, are aimed at training students and researchers in the study of writing as a technology,” he explains. The second edition of the Bits & Scripts workshop, held from 13 to 24 March 2025, aimed to introduce an interdisciplinary audience to computational tools in epigraphy to decipher scripts. “On the other hand, ScriptTalk was envisioned as a public event to make people aware of writing as social and cultural practice,” Sitabhra adds.

In his talk, ‘In the absence of a Rosetta Stone…’, Ashraf spoke about iCEL’s efforts in understanding the Indus script over the years. Incidentally, last year marked the centenary of the official announcement of the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization. Its inscriptions are found on various artifacts excavated from sites (located mostly in the northwest of the South Asian subcontinent) associated with the mature phase of the Indus Valley Civilization, dated between 2600-1900 BCE. “Our approach to deciphering the Indus script is based on comparative analysis of structures in different types of writing. We use databases of several known writing systems, both ancient and modern, and employ computational tools to compare their features with the Indus script,” he explains. As the Brahmi script, whose origin has been dated back to the 3rd century BCE, is the oldest deciphered South Asian writing system till date, they started collating a comprehensive digital database of the earliest Brahmi inscriptions to extend their database, in work led by Nandini. The group is also looking at expanding their database to include other South Asian scripts.

The Indus inscriptions consist of several hundreds of symbols and the script was first described as a “pictographic language”. Scholars believe it to be a logo-syllabic script, whose smallest subunit may represent a word or a single syllable.“However, there is a school of thought that says that the Indus inscriptions may not represent a writing system at all,” adds Ashraf. “But non-linguistic sequences would not exhibit the type of structural patterns that are associated with linguistic inscriptions. So in our search for a suitable non-linguistic system that we can use as a null model to compare with sequences that encode speech, we arrived at punch-marked coins as a good example.” These earliest coins of India, which were discussed in detail in a talk by Dr Rehan Ahamad, the Curator of the Mint Museum at the Indian Government Mint, Kolkata, are so-called because, instead of written inscriptions indicating, for example, the names of rulers who issued them, various symbols such as the sun, animals, plants, trees, hills, and geometric designs were punched onto them. The team is also working on creating a public database of 3D scans of artifacts that can provide contextual information related to the object on which Indus inscriptions have been found, which is currently missing in existing data.

Nandini’s talk on ‘Hand, Surface, Implement’, elaborated on the context in which writing systems evolved in early India. She spoke about how regional variation may arise from the different materials on which inscriptions were made and the tools used to make them. She traced the evolution of scripts from writing on potsherds, Ashoka’s corpus of inscriptions on rock edicts and pillars, and the appearance of Indo-Greek coins. “From the first century CE, we start seeing regional variations in the script. This happens when the material changes – for example, the rock inscriptions during Ashoka’s period look different from those on metal pillars. The hand making the inscriptions also changes and differences start to appear,” Nandini explains.

Pooja Saxena (center), a typeface designer, lettering artist and typographer, gave a public talk on public signage and the different materials used to make them. IMSc displayed a collection of her photographs showing signs from across India.

“I was struck by Pooja Saxena’s opening talk in ScriptTalk about typography in modern signs, how it differs between places, and the importance of the materials used in making them,” she says. “I could relate this to aspects of my own work on the evolution of writing systems. Listening to her talk brought to my mind the scribes who would have engaged in writing in Early India,” adds Nandini. “It is always possible to relate the present to the past.”

Pooja’s talk on ‘Material—Language’ was followed by an exhibition of her photographs of public signs. “It displayed the myriad aspects of writing in public places, which can also tell you something about society,” says Sitabhra. “She stressed the importance of preserving the legacy of hand-created signs, which brings together individuals, artists, and a long history of how commercial enterprises present themselves to the public and what kind of information they wish to convey,” he adds.

Another exhibition that opened during the event was Priyanka Mullick’s ‘From the House of the Harafs’. Priyanka is a descendant of Panchanan Karmakar, who is synonymous with the earliest printing technology in Bengal. Karmakar, under the supervision of Sir Charles Wilkins, an English printer and typographer in the service of the East India Company, carved the Bengali type used for printing the first book with printed Bengali characters, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778). Priyanka displayed some of the equipment used to cast type by Karmakar and his successors and demonstrated how the type was made.

Priyanka Mullick gave a talk on ‘From the House of the Harafs’ and demonstrated the typeface and tools used by her ancestors to print the first Bengali newspaper.

Apart from these talks and exhibitions, there were lectures by the heritage expert R Gopu on Mamallapuram inscriptions, Sundar Ganesan, the Director of the Roja Muthiah Research Library (RMRL), on how the collections at RMRL present the history of print in its various guises in Southern India, Mayank Vahia, a former professor of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, on the socio-cultural milieu in which the Indus Civilization inscriptions were created, and MV Bhaskar, an independent Indus researcher, on certain design aspects of Indus seals.

“Events such as this can help us understand why we write and why we write the way we do,” says Nandini. “Tracing back the history of writing can help people get a broader perspective of why and how we do things. It gives context to what we see today,” she adds. “It also makes us wonder how writing will evolve in the future in an increasingly digital world.”

"To understand the paradigm shifts in human societies over time, we need to understand the remains of the past,” says Ashraf. “We can find out about the Indus civilization by deciphering the inscriptions. Since the available data is limited, we need more people to engage with the study of the Indus script,” he adds. “Public events such as this can make the research accessible to the public and generate interest among them.”

script_talk_exhibitions_small

The exhibitions are currently on display at the IMSc Library, which is accessible to the general public between 9:30 am to 7:00 pm on weekdays and 10:00 to 5:00 pm on Saturdays.

(Photos: Aysha Mahira)

The cosmos, in four pieces

2025-08-05T00:00:00Z

The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, recently organised a public event on 'Charting India's Cosmic Odyssey: From Earth to the Edge of the Universe on the sidelines of the first national meeting in cosmology, 'Cosmic Connections: Bridging the early and late universe. As a part of the lecture series, four leading cosmologists gave an overview of the origin and evolution of the universe, and India’s ongoing and future efforts to probe its various stages.

A timeline of the universe

Left: A 14-billion-year long timeline of the universe (left) from the Big Bang to the appearance of fluctuations and the formation of galaxies. Right: Panels showing the structure of the universe today at different resolutions. Image by European Space Agency (ESA) – C Carreau.

The public talks began with L Sriramkumar, a Professor of Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, speaking about ‘Mapping the Cosmos: General Relativity and the Timeline of the Universe’. The universe has a rather uniform distribution of matter at the largest scale, but it can be “lumpy” at small spatial scales, where stars group to form galaxies, which come together to form galaxy clusters. According to the standard view of cosmology, this heterogeneity arose when the universe originated with the hot Big Bang and expanded, a process that continues until today. A red shift in the electromagnetic spectra of galaxies provides evidence that they are moving away from each other. This is because of spacetime expansion given by the general theory of relativity, much like how dots on an inflating balloon grow in size and move apart.

L Sriramkumar from IIT Madras, spoke about the history of the universe in his talk ‘Mapping the Cosmos: General Relativity and the Timeline of the Universe’. (Photo: IMSc Media)

Apart from galaxies, the universe is permeated by radiation, most of which is in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is a remnant of the high temperatures during the Big Bang, which can give us clues about the early universe. The universe cooled on expansion and the soup of protons and neutrons came together as atoms, allowing radiation to propagate without interacting with matter. However, quantum fluctuations in the early universe resulted in an uneven distribution of temperature, which can be inferred from the cosmic microwave radiation. More precise observations of this background radiation can help us understand processes in the early universe.

Origins of the universe

Improved resolution of the cosmic microwave background detected by three generations of satellites. COBE - Cosmic Background Explorer, WMAP - Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropic Probe. Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA.

In the following talk, Tarun Souradeep, Director of Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, spoke about ‘Echoes from the beginning: ECHO from the CMB-BHARAT’. The early universe can be described as a soup of radiation, which reaches us from the far reaches of the universe as the cosmic microwave background. Looking at this radiation farther away from us allows us to peer at events going back in time, as much as the universe at half a million years old. Over the last three decades, we have been able to see these past snapshots of the universe at higher definition using generations of space missions and ground-based observations. These studies have revealed that small inconsistencies in the early universe grew by gravitational instability to shape its large-scale structure today.

Tarun Souradeep, Director of the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, spoke about the history and future of Cosmic Microwave background (CMB) research in his talk titled ‘Echoes from the beginning: ECHO from the CMB-BHARAT’. (Photo: IMSc Media)

Looking ahead, a space-based observation platform can allow us to access a broader range of wavelengths of the cosmic microwave background. High-resolution observations can refine the parameters in the existing cosmological models. More importantly, these observations can help us understand the source and nature of perturbations in the early universe using signatures of the associated gravitational waves (ripples in spacetime). This will help us answer the fundamental question of when and how the universe originated. The CMB-Bharat consortium of researchers has proposed a satellite that can carry out these observations and contribute to “path-breaking, high-value and legacy science” in India.

The first stars are born

A composite image of the planned SKA-Low telescope in Western Australia. Image by SKAO.

Tirthankar Roy Choudhury, a professor at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics-Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune, spoke about probing the birth of galaxies in his talk on ‘From darkness to light: The SKA’s quest through cosmic time’. The early universe was dark before stars started to form, and light emerged in the “cosmic dawn” when the universe was around 200 million years old. Scientists have tried to understand this phase of the universe using observations from telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which detect signals from bright galaxies. However, a more complete picture of the cosmic dawn needs complementary observations and theoretical models.

Tirthankar Roy Choudhury from NCRA, Pune, gave an overview of efforts to understand the origin of galaxies in his talk ‘From darkness to light: The SKA’s quest through cosmic time’. (Photo: IMSc Media)

When stars form, hydrogen atoms in the intergalactic medium get ionized because of the star’s radiation, with atoms closer to a galaxy changing first. Radiosignals coming from neutral hydrogen atoms can tell us about their distribution relative to the ionized state, providing an indirect signal of star formation. These signals have long wavelengths and can only be captured using really large and sensitive telescopes. One such ambitious inter-governmental project is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Observatory, which is building two large arrays of telescopes in Australia and South Africa. India joined the project a decade ago, contributing to software development and hardware prototyping, and formally became a member country last year. Around 24 Indian institutions and working groups are currently contributing to various aspects of the project.

The death of stars

The planned LIGO-India project is a multi-institutional effort that will help in better sky coverage and localization of gravitational waves from binary blackhole mergers. Image by LIGO-India/IUCAA.

The last lecture in the series was by KG Arun, a professor at the Chennai Mathematical Institute, Chennai, who spoke about the final stages of a star’s life in his talk ‘Ripples in spacetime: LIGO and the late universe’. When a massive star dies after exhausting all its fuel, it undergoes a supernova explosion. If it is less than 30 times the mass of a sun, it turns into a neutron star, while a more massive star collapses into a blackhole, where all its mass is compacted to a single point. Around four-fifths of the stars in our galaxy occur as binaries, a pair of stars that revolve around each other. Dancing around each other in the swang song of their life, these dense objects send out ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves.

KG Arun from CMI, Chennai, spoke about studying the death of stars in his talk titled 'Ripples in spacetime: LIGO and the late universe’. (Photo: IMSc Media)

Gravitational waves can be used to probe parts of the universe that are dark and cannot be detected by telescopes. As accelerating blackhole binaries lose energy, their orbits get smaller and they spiral into each other, sending out gravitational waves with increasing amplitude and frequency, before their final merger. These gravitational waves are really faint by the time they reach the earth and need sensitive instruments for detection. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the USA is one such detector, which found the first blackhole merger a decade ago. The multi-institutional LIGO-India being built in Maharashtra will help in better localization of the source of gravitational waves and significantly increase the volume of the universe being observed in concert with the other facilities.

A galaxy of cosmologists gathers at IMSc

2025-08-05T00:00:00Z

The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, recently organised the first national meeting in cosmology,'Cosmic Connections: Bridging the Early and Late Universe', from 28 July to 1 August 2025. It aimed at bringing together researchers studying the universe from its beginnings to the later epochs. It was attended by over 90 participants, with invited talks by over 40 speakers representing 25 research institutions across the country.

The conference—organized by IMSc’s Dhiraj Kumar Hazra and funded by IMSc, Department of Atomic Energy—was conceived to create a dedicated annual platform for the Indian cosmology community, uniting theorists, observers, and instrumentation experts under one roof. This year’s program spanned topics from the Early, Intermediate, and Late Universe, with a strong emphasis on fostering interactions across subfields and career stages. It also aimed to provide a prominent platform for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers to present their work and engage with the broader community.

The Scientific Organizing Committee included faculty from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore; Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune; Indian Institute of Technology Madras; Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune; National Centre for Radio Astrophysics - Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune; and Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bangalore.

“In the early days, gravitation and cosmology research was restricted to a few institutes in the country,” says Dhiraj. “You can think of Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri and Jayant Narlikar as the very first generation of modern astronomers in the country. The number of branches of this tree has grown with every generation,” he adds. Dhiraj explains that precision astronomy began with the launch of NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission in the 90s, which led to a surge of interest in astronomy across the world. The cosmology community grew in size, and India was not left behind. “Today, the field of cosmology is multi-messenger, with observations from different wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum and gravitational waves,” says Dhiraj.

The first edition of the national meeting in cosmology was attended by Indian cosmologists across career stages, and hosted 81 talks and 4 poster presentations.

“This event is very special because, as I heard from one of the speakers, almost 99% of Indian cosmologists are here,” said IMSc Director V Ravindran, opening an outreach program organised as a part of the event. “It is a great time for Indian cosmology to come together,” said Tarun Souradeep, Director of RRI, Bangalore. “When I came into the field in the 2000s, the front row of this auditorium would house all of India’s cosmologists,” he recalled. “I am delighted that we now have a very strong community,” he added, pointing to the packed room.

“The ripple effect of this is that India has funded the LIGO-India project [LIGO - Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory] and the the Square Kilometre Array in South Africa and Australia. We have also proposed the Exploring Cosmic History and Origin (ECHO) mission through CMB-Bharat [CMB - Cosmic Microwave Background] consortium of more than 150 scientists,” adds Dhiraj. Some of its members got together for a discussion on the sidelines of the cosmology meeting at IMSc.

Dhiraj stresses that one of the main aims of the meeting was to provide a platform for PhD students and postdoctoral researchers to get to know the different aspects of cosmology, present their work and ideas, and look for future opportunities. “We strived to give everyone equal opportunity. During the five days of the meeting, we managed to host 81 talks and four poster presentations,” Dhiraj says.

Another aspect, which was in the agenda right from the beginning, was an outreach component aimed at a general audience. “We need to go beyond technical talks to seed the next generation of cosmologists,” Dhiraj says. “The aim is to instill interest in students about what cosmologists are currently doing and why it is important. To have a next generation of researchers who can build detectors and make observations from India, we need students interested in engineering, software and theory,” he emphasises. “Talks from eminent physicists can inspire students to work in these sectors.”

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