2018 - Annual Report

Abstract

Through the year the Institute conducted a number of workshops and conferences. Specifically, the International workshop on “Economy as a complex system” was a workshop focusing on statistical physics as a tool in economics. There was a research school on “Mechanical properties of complex solids” focusing on bringing together a wide range of physics in the field to share techniques and recent developments. There was a conference on the broad topic of “disorder and interaction” in both classical and quantum systems. In the field of mathematical modeling of diseases, the computational biology group conducted a mini-workshop on tuberculosis research. An international conference on number theory, bringing together several leading number theorists, was organized by the Institute this year. A conference on “recent advances in parameterized complexity” which included a school for graduate students was also conducted this year. One off-campus meeting on ‘Logic and Automata Theory : A tribute to Zoltan Esik’ was organized by IMSc faculty during this period. We are very pleased to note that our outreach programmes like ’Teachers’ Enrichment Workshop’, ‘Summer School Students Workshop’, ‘Facets‘, ‘kaNita-kAnakam“, ‘Foldscope Workshop’, ‘Nag Memorial Endowment Lecture’, ‘Student Talks on Trending Topics in Theory 2017’, ‘Enriching Mathematics Education’, ‘Science Fun, Science Toys’, ‘Scientists and school education : A discussion’, ‘Indian Women in Science’ and ‘Science at the Sabha’ are increasingly popular. These programmes have been attracting more and more students and teachers, mainly from nearby regions, but some from other parts of the country. The outreach related activity in the Institute is the initiative of several faculty members. Their untiring efforts, enthusiastically supported by the IMSc administration, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, to make scientific research accessible and exciting to students and teachers at various levels, deserves all praise. 10 students were awarded PhD, and 7 students have submitted their PhD theses. 3 students were awarded MSc by Research, and a student has submitted her Master’s thesis under the supervision of our faculty. There was, as usual, a lot of participation of IMSc members in international conferences, in the form of invited talks, paper presentations etc. Among several such we highlight a few: Prof. Sitabhra Sinha was an invited speaker at the joint conference Econophysics Colloquium (EC) 2017 and Polish Symposium on Econo- and Sociophysics (FENS) 2017, during 5-7 July 2017, and Prof. Meena Mahajan was an invited speaker at the CSL 2017 (Computer Science Logic conference) held during Aug 20-24, 2017 and at STACS 2018 (Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science) held during Feb 2018. There are several ongoing collaborations, both national and international, with research groups IMSc. Some of these collaborations are as formal agreements and MoUs. In the last year there are two such collaborative projects on ”Precision physics for the large hadron collider” with Universite de Louvain, Belgium and Universita de Milano, Italy. There is a collaborative project on ”modeling soft glass flow” with Universite Grenoble, France. An international joint research unit (UMI) RELAX, (which stands for Research Lab in Computer Science), has been set up (based in Chennai Mathematical Institute) to facilitate bringing together research institutions/universities in France and India, including IMSc. There were 44 lecture courses conducted at the Institute during the reporting period. Additionally, 2 lecture courses were given at Chennai Mathematical Institute for its National Undergraduate Programme. The awards and honors bestowed on our faculty for their contributions. Dishant M Pancholi was awarded ‘B M Birla Science Prize’ jointly with Neena Gupta of ISI. Parthasarathi Chakraborty was elected as a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore. Gautam I. Menon was awarded Shasgtri Mobility Program Fellowship, for 2018, by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute. Prasad, Amritanshu was awarded Srinivasa Ramanujan Memorial Award Lecture, for 2017, by the Indian Mathematical Society.