India celebrates National Mathematics Day on December 22 every year. The day marks the birth anniversary of famous mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. In 2012, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared the date as National Mathematics Day to honour the great man. Here we are bringing to you some Delhi-based mathematicians who have brought glory to the nation.
R.D. Sharma
A normal student’s life is incomplete without getting their hands on one of the books authored by R.D. Sharma once in their lifetime. Dr Ravi Dutt Sharma, popularly known as R. D. Sharma, is an author, mathematics teacher who has authored many reference books of which most of which are Central Board of Secondary Education Mathematics books. He was the vice-principal and Head of the Department of Science and Humanities at the Delhi government’s Guru Nanak Dev Institute of Technology before joining the just opened Delhi skill and entrepreneurship university.
Teaching students at the Diploma level, he holds great regard for the young learners. Having been teaching diploma students for more than 3 decades, he has authored ‘Applied Mathematics’ for diploma students and Engineering Mathematics for B.Tech students recently. About his long venture of writing books, he says that “he wanted to make it easy for every student out there and writing is my second favourite thing. I combined the two and was able to bring about a change in the lives of numerous students”
Akshay Venkatesh
Delhi-born Akshay Venkatesh is the brightest star in the sky of mathematicians.
Conferred with the prestigious award of field medal commonly described as the Nobel Prize of mathematics, In 2018, he became the second Indian to do so after Manjul Bhargava (who is a Canadian-American mathematician born to Indian parents) At the tender age of 2 years, he had moved to Perth, Australia, with his parents. Growing up, he had been something of a child prodigy, finishing high school at 13 and earning his undergraduate degree at 16 from the University of Western Australia as its youngest graduate ever. Akshay’s journey has been full of achievements and recognition since the very beginning when he used to win olympiads. While we were busy idolising Ranbir Kapoor’s character in ‘Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani’ when we were 20-years-old, Akshay had already earned his PhD!
His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory.
Professor Dinesh Singh
Dinesh Singh is a professor of mathematics and chancellor of K.R. Mangalam University. Although he is born in Varanasi, he is purely a Delhite. He earned his B.Sc (Hons. – Maths) in 1975 and M.A. (Maths) in 1977 from St. Stephen’s college, followed by M.Phil (Maths) in 1978 from the University of Delhi. He is a distinguished fellow of Hackspace at Imperial College London and has been an adjunct professor of Mathematics at the University of Houston. He had served as the 21st Vice-chancellor of the University of Delhi. For his services to the nation, he was conferred with the Padma Shri which is the fourth highest civilian award awarded by the Republic of India.
Professor Singh started his career as a Lecturer at St. Stephen’s College, the University of Delhi in 1981 and then in 1987, he joined the Department of Mathematics, University of Delhi. Professor Sigh has a specialization in Operator Theory, Functional analysis and Harmonic analysis. Incidentally, Professor Singh is an adjunct professor at the University of Houston and has also taught at, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
Nikhil Shrivastava
We all have gone through phases where we all are stuck with a maths problem and even after repetitive efforts to solve that, we cannot accomplish the task. One such problem which arose in 1959 (KADISON-SINGER PROBLEM) had stayed unsolved for so long until the Delhi boy cracked the problem and brought glory to Indians and added another proud feather in the cap.
Nikhil Shrivastava is an associate professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was born in New Delhi and attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, graduating with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and computer science in 2005. An Indian-American mathematician, he has been jointly selected for the inaugural Ciprian Foias Prize in Operator Theory by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Earlier he had grabbed the George Polya Prize in 2014 and the Michael and Shiela Held Prize in 2021.
