2003 - Annual Report

Abstract

In memory of the late Prof. Subhashish Nag, who was on the faculty of this Institute, a "Prof. S. Nag Endowment Memorial Lecture Series" has been established. The first lecture in this series was delivered by Prof. D. Sullivan, from the Department of Mathematics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA, in December 2002.

The Institute was honoured to host a visit by Prof. Gerard’t Hooft, Nobel Laureate, Universiteit Utrecht, during January 2003. In addition to interacting with the scientific community, Prof. ’t Hooft gave a public lecture titled ’’The Universe Inside the Atom”.

I congratulate Dr. Surya Ramana (Mathematics) and Dr. Subashis Sinha (Physics), who received the best thesis award of this Institute.

The Institute conducted a workshop on “Mathematica and the software packages Hyp and Hyp-q”; an international conference on “Special functions and their applications”; a discussion meeting on “Harmonic analysis”; a meeting on “Robustness, emergent behaviour and pattern formation in biological systems”; a school and workshop on “Automata, concurrency and logic”; and a discussion meeting on “Statistical mechanics of threshold activated systems”.

The Institute co-sponsored and took active part in the discussion meeting on “Field-theoretic aspects of gravity-III” held at Kochi, and a seminar on “Current trends in Mathematics” at the Madras Christian College.

The following activities have become an annual feature of the Institute: (i) The Institute Seminar Week, (ii) NBHM Nurture Programme, (iii) Refresher course in Physics.

The Institute has also participated in several national and international collaborative projects: the IFCPAR projects on “Analytical and combinatorial number theory” and “Automata and concurrency: Syntactic methods for verification”, the CD-ROMS project on “The life and works of Srinivasa Ramanujan”, the “India-based neutrino observatory” project, the Indo- UK project on “Highly efficient data structures”, the DRDO project on “Novel materials for applications in molecular electronics and energy storage devices” the DFG-INSA project on “The spectral theory of Schrodinger operators”, and the Indo-US project on “Studies in quantum statistics”.

This report has been compiled through the efforts of a committee consisting of Drs. Vijay Kodiyalam, Meena Mahajan, R. Parthasarathy, and Mr. Paul Pandian (Librarian).