1998 - Annual Report

Abstract

The golden jubilee of the country’s independence was commemorated by us through a sequence of Public Lectures entitled Swarnajayanti Public Lectures on Frontiers of Science,with a view to take Science and its excitement to the lay public. This was also an occasion to take an introspective view of the status of research in independant India. Accordingly,we hosted a 3 day seminar on 50 years of Indian Mathematics, during which significant advancements made in various disciplines of Mathematics were highlighted by the experts.Another feature of the seminar were two very interesting panel discussions, on Mathematics Education, and on Research in the Indian Institutions, and there were numerous interesting suggestions that were generated by the event.Among the laurels won for the Institute by its faculty, I should like to highlight the recently announced SWARNAJAYANTI Fellowship to Madan Rao, and the Satyendra Nath Bose Medal awarded to G. Rajasekaran. Further we are proud of the election of S. Kesavan and V.S. Sunder as Fellows of the National Academy of Sciences (Allahabad) and the honorarydoctorate conferred on Tapash Chakraborty by University of Oulu, Finland. The annual report has been compiled through the efforts of a committee consisting of V.S.Sunder, T.R. Govindarajan, Venkatesh Raman, P. Ray, K.S. Santhanagopalan and SudeshnaSinha; further G. Venkatesan provided some support to them.