2000 - Annual Report

Abstract

It gives great pleasure to present the Annual Report of the Institute for the academic year 1999-2000 for the first time in the capacity of Prof. R. Bala Subramanian as the Director. First of all, we place on record our deep appreciation of the distinguished service rendered to this Institute by my predecessor Prof. R. Ramachandran.

He worked for the general well being of the Institute members,by bringing in the CHSS Medical Scheme, by constructing staff quarters, and accommodation facilities for guests and students. The construction of the new office block, sanctioned in the Ninth Plan, is making rapid progress and we expect to occupy it in a little over a year’s time. We are also happy that he will continue to serve this Institute as a Senior Professor and we will have the benefit of his experience for a few more years.As usual, the academic year 1999-2000 has been an eventful one for this Institute with many accomplishments. The Institute has initiated an annual event, called Foundation Day to be celebrated on January 3 every year and on this day, an award for the best thesis coming out of this Institute would be presented.

It is pleasure in congratulating Dr. Saurya Das, the first recipient of the award. The Chief Guest of this year’s function was Dr. A.Kalanidhi, Vice-Chancellor of Anna University.Among the laurels won by our faculty members from outside, mention should be made of Prof. S. Kesavan who has received the Tamil Nadu Scientist Award for 1998. He has also received the C.L. Chandna Award (1999) for contributions to mathematical research and teaching. Prof. K.H. Paranjape was elected in 1999 as Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, Allahabad. I take this opportunity to congratulate them and hope they and others would win such marks of appreciation and recognition from the scientific community.The Institute has, as usual, taken the initiative to organize and to host several conferences and workshops. The series of Workshops in High Energy Physics Phenomenology (WHEPP),has now stabilized in to a bi-annual event attempting to bring together active particle pheomenologists from various universities and research institutes all over India and abroad.The sixth workshop in this series -WHEPP 6 was hosted by the IMSc this year. Another noteworthy meeting was the mini symposium on Motives- a new area unifying geometry and arithmetic - held for more than a month at the Institute. It could be the beginning of anew trend - a sort of focussed visiting scientist programme. The Institute also actively took part in the organization of the annual FST & TCS meeting and hosted one of the satellite workshops on Mobile Computing. We also organized a workshop on Recent Trends in the Quantum Hall Effect. Several collaborative international research projects have been awarded to members of the Institute. In particular, I would like to mention the DST-DAAD project on Theoretical Computer Science with Germany, the DST-NSF project in Mathematical Physics with USA in addition to the existing Federation Arrangement with the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. This report has been compiled through the efforts of a committee that consists of Drs. R.Sridhar, R. Anishetty, G. Date, T.R. Govindarajan, S. Kesavan, Kamal Lodaya and Mr.K.S. Santhanagopalan.