The Institute of Mathematical Sciences

A carnival of kanitam

November 11, 2025 | Bharti Dharapuram 

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.

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.

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.

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 125^th 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.

“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.

“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.

“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.”

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.

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.”

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