Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Infosys Mathematics Prize


The first award goes to IIT-K computer science professor Manindra Agrawal. Here's the press release from Infosys:

Dr. Manindra Agrawal has been awarded the Infosys Mathematics Prize for his outstanding work in Complexity Theory, the branch of mathematics concerned with the study of algorithms for solving mathematical and related scientific problems, especially their efficiency and running times. Dr. Agrawal is best known for the discovery of a deterministic polynomial time algorithm, for primality testing in his joint paper with his former students. This discovery resolved a long-standing problem of a fast test of primality, which had been the subject of intense study in the field of mathematics and computer science research.

Prof. Agrawal's breakthrough work on prime numbers made a big splash worldwide in 2002 [NYTimes, Frontline], and he won the S.S. Bhatnagar Prize for Mathematics the following year. Here's a brief bio.

The Infosys Mathematics Prize is the biggest award (in any branch of science) in India; it carries a cash award of one million rupees. Here's an earlier post on this Prize.

0 Comments: