New faculty on the block: Samya Kumar Ray
December 16, 2025 | Bharti Dharapuram
Samya Kumar Ray recently joined IMSc as a faculty member in the Mathematics group. He completed his doctoral research from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and carried out postdoctoral research at Wuhan University, China. Before joining IMSc, Samya held positions at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram. His research interests are in classical and quantum noncommutative mathematics.
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.
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