An NYU Professor of graduate and undergraduate courses in statistics, probability and analysis at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Studies has won the Abel Prize for 2007. It’s kinda like the Nobel, but for maths and he’s the first desi to win it. In other words, this is a big deal (thanks, karmakong and Sanjiv).
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2007 to Srinivasa S.R. Varadhan, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York. He receives the prize “for his fundamental contributions to probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviationâ€. [link]
As for the caption under the good Professor’s picture: don’t you ever see an Uncle or an Auntie and just want to hug them? Especially if they seem to be radiating wisdom and kindness? Ah, I’ve been taking what Saheli is on, so pardon us as we skip through flower-laden fields, seeing the absolute best in people. He just seems like the kind of Uncle I’d love to have (as opposed to most of my Uncles, whom I have to love). Well, that and my devotion to people who are fantastic at math is probably responsible for some of this effusiveness. 😀
Back on topic:
Probability theory is the mathematical tool for analyzing situations governed by chance. The theory of large deviations studies the occurrence of rare events. This subject has concrete applications to fields as diverse as physics, biology, economics, statistics, computer science, and engineering. [link]
Unfortunately, there is a typo in the above definition, “my love life†should immediately follow “computer scienceâ€.
Varadhan’s theory of large deviations provides a unifying and efficient method for clarifying a rich variety of phenomena arising in complex stochastic systems, in fields as diverse as quantum field theory, statistical physics, population dynamics, econometrics and finance, and traffic engineering. It has also greatly expanded our ability to use computers to simulate and analyze the occurrence of rare events. Over the last four decades, the theory of large deviations has become a cornerstone of modern probability, both pure and applied.[link]
For more information on this dazzling desi, peep his biography here. Next up at SM: why Anna is the only South Indian person ever to have never taken calculus. Cause for shame or America is to blame? You decide.
I’m quite surprised that no desi has previously won either the Abel Prize nor the Fields Medal. It’s about time! Didn’t we invent the zero, dammit?
Tee hee, Anna—who needs my fairy dust when the goodsir provides us with such wonderful, fabulous Math? Mmmmm, math.
“why Anna is the only South Indian person ever to have never taken calculus.”
how you’d u pull that off…I tried to beg, manipulate and even shed some crocodile tears to my dean to get out of that requirement-but they just weren’t having it. Still have not had to use that stuff even once…they lied off their ass-you so don’t need for basic econometrics.
which school let’s you not take calculus?
If you read his bio, Anna has linked, his eldest son died in 9/ 11 in Twin Towers. His wife is also a professor @ NYU.
Oy, Kush. . .I think I’m gonna cry. . .. . .the image of Uncle & Aunty braving CBGBs to hear their son play. . .
Kush, Saheli…
I spent a few hours thinking about whether or not to include that tragic fact; after I read it, it was all I could think about, especially as I sifted through more material to potentially add to this post. At the end of my deliberation, I realized that as unforgettable and heartbreaking as that aspect of our “Uncle’s” life was, it had nothing to do with the Abel prize.
That and I knew one of you intrepid types would ferret out that detail, anyway.
And yes, it definitely is part of why I wanted to throw my arms around an Uncle’s or Auntie’s neck, potentially inappropriately and utterly sincerely. Saheli, I was also touched at how much his parents loved and supported his dream.
Sigh.
I must honestly, and rather shamefacedly, admit that I had never before heard of the Abels. Apparently they’ve been around nearly as long as the Nobels. The Fields is more recent and gets much more buzz. It is a quadrennial affair, and you have to be under 40 to win. One of last year’s Fields Medalists, Terence Tao, seems to have been the first ethnic Chinese to win the Fields (though a number of Japanese have won it over the years.)
Desis may have invented zero, but chess is also supposed to have been invented in India. Until fairly recently there were no Indian grandmasters, now there are around 15, and Anand is World No.1 ! Maybe desi math prodigies will follow desi chess prodigies to stardom, even win the Fields.
This guy taught me probability theory. He is a great teacher. Also, they are all very smart in that family. His son Ashok (scroll down on that page) is a top trader on Wall Street. His other kid, Gopal also very smart (amongst other things, a talented musician, the founder of an online advertising company, and MD at Cantor Fitzgerald) died on 9-11.
Chachaji/Siddharth, The Abel prize is quite new. It was conceived of in 2001. The first Abel prize was given out in 2003.
http://www.abelprisen.no/en/abelprisen/historie.html
“Then on 23 August 2001, during a speech on the Blindern campus of the University of Oslo, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg announced that the Government would establish an Abel Fund worth NOK 200 million.”
Sanjiv
Thanks Sanjiv! You’re right, it is only the history of the prize that goes back to 1902, Abel’s centenary, when the thought of conceiving it first occured! That would explain why I hadn’t heard of it. That, and my poor reading skills too.
I’m quite surprised no desi has won this prize before, either. I was shocked when i read that fact. Also, i join anna in the ranks of being desi and never have taken calc, as well.
There have been two chinese and three japanese who have won the Fields Medal. A lebanese-brit, Michael Atiyah, has won both the Fields and the Abel Prize:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_medal
Chinese students absolutely dominate the International Math Olympiad. Iran, Korea, Japan, Vietnam also figure in the top ten often. India never. Thats pretty sorry for a nation/people that gave the world the decimal numeral system and Srinavas Ramanujan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mathematical_Olympiad
Hopefully Varadhan’s Fields Medal will inspire more parents to encourage desi youngsters to go for math instead of the useless Spelling Bee’s.
HEY. I resemble that comment! I did spelling bees and look how I…ah…um…wait, you’re totally right. Go team maths! 😉
What the! Was it announced just now? Then how on earth did one of my former profs tell me last week that Varadhan is an Abel nominee? Are these things not secret? Varadhan’s books on probability and diffusion processes are popular among grad students.
No. I got an indignant email about how it had been ignored, just now. 😉 I’m kidding. We get plenty of similarly angry missives and still almost never blog them. KIDDING. This is what I do: I read all tips and if something fascinates me AND I HAVE TIME, I try and blog it.
In the process of doing that, I look for other information related to the tip…40% of the time, what I find bores me, I lose interest and I leave it. THIS time, the more I read, the more affectionate I felt, and not just b/c I have an uber-huge soft spot for people from Madras these days. He just seemed wonderful and deserving of some love, even if it was a few days late. That’s why I, the least maths-inclined mutineer posted it when I did.
Anna, among other things, you’re an absolute Mistress of the Apropos Malapropism! One of the many reasons I love your writing. Somebody actually found a Faraday’s Law of Reduction yesterday. There is one, though it is not known as such and usually not taught in Physics. But I’m mixing up threads…
If its any consolation, a desi dude did win the Turing award (the supposed Nobel of computing).
Um, is it too late to clamor for a nomination?
Chachaji, India/Pakistan’s first chess grandmaster died forty years ago ( link/shameless plug for own blog ).
Oh, OK. I thought maybe that prof I mentioned had some secret preview or the Abel process is just not so secretive as the Nobel. Sure, our desi uncle deserves your and our love. Open the spigots!
Alright! Mark me down! Hehe, that’s why it’s kurma, not korma.
Thanks Sakshi. But between the time he died (in Pakistan) and Anand became grandmaster, there was no other (Indian) grandmaster, right?
True. I also agree with your point that we’ll see a lot more Indians gaining recognition in the future.
Their son sounded like an incredible person, finding time to write songs, gigging at CBGBs, and engineer a G.G Allin album (That is so punk!) between trading at Merril Lynch and starting his own company. Like his father, he’s an inspiring fellow – I would have loved to have heard his music.
I didn’t intend to come off as snarky. Its just that I have a soft corner for Sultan Khan and his struggle, and it bothers me that he is more or less forgotten.
Good stuff! Mathematicians for some reason always impress me. Not like there is any reason against it, but even though physicists, doctors, etc, are quite smart, its the mathematicians who always score it.
This guy reminds me of Ramanujan (I speak as if he was my neighbor). He was, hands down, the man when it comes to mathematics. Talk about a self-taught mathematician (who used to fail physics since he studied math all the time) who came up with more than 4000 theorems within a life spanning only 33 years! And, apparently there’s a lot of stuff of his which is undocumented. I heard they discovered a notebook of his in which he had a whole bunch of yet unpublished stuff.
anna, surely america is to blame. however, you somewhat made up for it with the refence to maths. that has to count for something!
ANNA: consider yourself blessed by the gods not having taken calculus. it was a pre-req for med school. otherwise i would’ve ran the other way, if given the choice. for me it was the hardest class.. period.
i wish i loved math more. but i don’t.
don’t feel shame… or blame america.. consider yourself blessed..
(yes, calculus is important for those mathmatically inclined, and if you apply it to the real world…but i never did.. call me LAZY..)
I think that more people will get interested in calculus if it is somehow taught with introductory physics (i.e. Newtonian mechanics); and I mean as a part of physics, and not separately….the history and philosophy of calculus is quite interesting. At least that was how my physics teacher got me (someone who was burnt on my first meeting with cal in high school) interested.
as an interesting side note, have you seen the documentary on S. Varadhan’s wife. I think it’s called “knowing her place”. I remember seeing it in the early nineties and being very thankful for my family of harmonious under acheivers. “Raghu” is featured in the movie as well.
Sakshi, that was an awesome blog post about Sultan Khan!
What does producing mathematical ideas (even zero and calculus) a prodigy here and there (Ramanujan) have to do with producing contemporary mathematicians? Developing a culture of mathematics (or for that matter any field of study) is a very different enterprise. Isn’t it interesting that Dr. Varadhan and his advisor – Dr. CR Rao one of the pillars of mathematical statistics – both live and work in the US? The student moved to the US >40 years ago. The teacher retired from the Indian Stat. Inst. and moved over to PSU 20 years ago and was recently honoured with the National Medal of Science. But their homeland has no use for them. Dr.Varadhan fielded questions from the great Kolmogorov at his thesis defence at ISI. That’s as high as it gets!
If the Indian education system continues to be run as a ramshackle politico-bureaucratic fiefdom with incompetents at the helm, it will be at least another 100 years before it produces anything of value. In the meanwhile talented graduate candidates from schools such as ISI will continue to move over to the US to do their PhD, never to return to India.
I’m sure some of these people would have a different view.
Kolmogorov was on Varadhan’s committee! Or perhaps in the audience? How did you come to find this factoid, Shiva?
Trivia – Abel is one of the very few mathematicians whose name is used for a mathematical term in lower case (as in abelian group) – a sign of true fame in math :). In fact, I can’t immediately think of another example. ‘gaussian’ may be another, although it could be just sloppiness on the part of writers. Anybody has some examples?
I realize this is a South Asian American blog, but I still think we should be using the term “maths.”
I think this probably has something to do with that hippie left coast school you went to where everyone was too busy doing drugs and going to peace rallies — they must not have done what every other university does, which is require South Indians to take calculus. Of course, at my East Coast/Southern school, they saw me in calculus class and said “what’s this white boy doing in calculus class??”
Kindly be noticing the second sentence of this post, which is in bold font, no less.
Thank you for being the first person on the right coast to EVER recognize that Davis out-Berkeleys Berkeley. In other news, I was talking about HIGH SCHOOL, people.
At one point, I was one of approximately five South Indians at my school…this was the same point when I was also the only Malayalee. I believe this allowed me to slip under the radar and avoid this brutal requirement easily.
I resent and hold in contempt your attempt to inform us all of your skin color! Provocateur! You know what happens on this blog when someone goes there. Harrumph! Shed your smirking superiority and admit your error! Next you shall either drop the H-bomb or let it slip that you’re Brahmin or something. I am disgusted! Disgusted, I tell you!
Thanks, Kurma. 🙂
Another bit of trivia(stolen directly from wikipedia): Abel is also the only mathematician to have a statue in the nude: something to do with dying young I guess.
I agree, though I’ve recently heard of a few well-known Indian mathematicians(eg, Narendra Karmarkar) moving back to India, and also some good stuff gets done at TIFR, ISI, and also to some extent at IISc and the IITs.
They probably just figured you were Ethiopian or something.
DTK, ducking, and now likely in trouble
Varadhan’s classes were great, gave you a completely intuitive picture of probability theory. Plus his work on large deviations is really really amazingly beautiful (think Galois Theory beautiful).
Philistine! Know you not that it is forbidden to speak in such a way about her majesty, the Empress-dictator of Sepialand??? You shall be tarred, feathered, drawn, quartered, painted, dimed and BANNED for such treason. Kiss the kundi and always agree or DIE. Muster the Rohirrim!!!!
To Kurma @ #14:
The news was posted under the SM news-tab as early as March 24.
And to Shiva @ #29
While the above sentence begins accurately enough, it ends inaccurately. “Inaccurately”, that is, in the context of Indian mathematics. It is pleasant to discover how good an image active Indian mathematicians, working in India, collectively enjoy in other countries that have a mathematical culture. Perhaps you’re conflating “producing anything of value” with awards. But this is really so because awards have traditionally not been a part of the mathematics landscape. It is only recently that one is beginning to notice a whole truckload of awards. A majority of these have been instituted by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) with as much the aim of raising the public profile of mathematics as of “celebrating the achievements” of mathematicians.
Or you could just read the thread and note the explanation which was provided here. 😉
Please accept my apologies, O Indian Princess!
DTK, ducking even more
Oh no you DI’NT!!! Lucky you, I have shite aim. And GChat, for that matter.
I’m pleasantly surprised; I was expecting the obligatory Mallu-Ethio conflating “Queen of Sheba” joke.
Exactly – there being no Math Nobel, Fields being quadrennial, and Abel being so recent. In fact, one of last year’s Fields Medalists actually declined the award! Mathematics awards will certainly raise its public profile, but will it also change the motivations of those who pursue it at the highest levels, and might it even alter the personality profile of those in it, or even attract those who otherwise might not go into it?
Look around you, maths! Dig it.
things are changing…
While I agree that this awards business is relatively new to Mathematics, Perelman turning down the Field medal has little to do with this. Here’s the “famous” New Yorker article on the matter. He dislikes mathematicians and that’s that. It wouldn’t have matter what award was given to him. Now, if there were a million bucks to go with it… such as the Clay Mathematics Institute prize….
Perelman won’t say whether he would decline the CMI prize unless he is offered it first.
Being Malayalee is not a valid excuse. Madhava was a great Malayalee mathematician.
Note that India did not merely contribute the decimal system. There was far more.
Finally, note that I am quoting a Scottish source. Earlier, I used to feel that Indian sources were jingoistic. After emigrating to the US, I have begun to feel this is not the case.
Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming contains several historical references, many of which are not European.
A person from siddhartha’s link won this award
Congratulations to Varadhan & Sujatha.
TIFR, Matscience, HC Instititute, Allahabad, and a few other institutions are no doubt very good. But they are struggling to attract students and faculty. As for the universities and even some IITs less said the better. The university funding system in India is insane; there are some places where 90% of the budget is used to pay salaries! Even in the IITs the maths department is more involved with teaching the engg students. One very well known school (extremely well regarded I may add) till recently employed engineering math faulty only in its maths department and had nothing to do with the deeper mathematics its counterparts elsewhere are known for. The ISI – a pioneer in mathematical statistics – which at one time advised the US government, is today struggling to find students. Every year almost the entire M.Stat. class (~15-20) leaves for greener pastures abroad. And with the present craze for the service sector young mathematicians are snapped up by I-banks. There are people like Narendra Karmarkar who return to work in India. But for every Karmarkar there are many Madhusudans and Varadhans. Typically in India, Maths Olympiad contestants get to train for about a month. In other countries contestants are spotted early and put into special schools where they do little else.
And what is this thing about a 3rd world mathematicians prize. Are they not capable of competing with 1st world mathematicians? Or must 1st world mathematicians be kept out of contention for the Ramanujan young mathematicians prize? Considering the Fields must be won by 40; the Ramanujan “Young” Mathematicians prize is misnamed with its 45 year age limit! Now why not set an age limit of say 27 or 33?
Having a nude statue of yourself – that can be uncomfortable ….
Shiva, what’s wrong with engineering schools having they math departments packed with applied mathematicians?
The sad fact is I came to know about him for the first time after reading about his son, who is a trader at Goldman and made the Trader 100 ( top 100 earning traders) list.