Mahan Mitra

Mahan Mitra

Mahan Mitra
Nationality Indian
Fields Mathematics
Notable awards Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award

Mahan Mitra, also known as Mahan Maharaj and Swami Vidyanathananda, is an Indian mathematician and a recipient of the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Mathematical Sciences.[1][2]

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Early education

Mahan Mitra studied at St Xavier’s Collegiate School, Calcutta, till Class XII. He then then entered IIT Kanpur after securing a national rank of 67 in the Indian Institutes of Technology Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE). He initially chose to study electrical engineering but switched to mathematics upon realizing his love for that subject, and despite having an almost perfect GPA, and despite persuasion from family members.[3] Switching to the study of mathematics was a turning point for his life, as he immensely enjoyed his studies in the following years. He graduated with an M.Sc. in integrated mathematics from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur in 1992 and as the gold medalist of his batch.[4]

Career

Mahan Mitra joined the PhD program in mathematics at UC Berkeley with Andrew Casson as his advisor.[5] He received the Earl C. Anthony Fellowship, U.C. Berkeley in 1992-1993 and the prestigious Alfred P.Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 1996-1997.[6] After earning a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997, he worked briefly at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1998. Spiritually inclined, he joined the Ramakrishna Math as a renunciate upon being impressed by the life and work of the Vedantic philosopher Ramakrishna Paramahansa.[7] His initial name was Brahmachari BrahmaChaitanya. He was renamed as Swami Vidyanathananda after receiving his Saffron robe on 12 January 2009. Swami Vidyanathananda is a monk at the order's headquarters at Belur Math and an associate Professor of mathematics at the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University at Belur Math.[8] He has widely published and presented his research in the area of hyperbolic manifolds and "ending lamination spaces."[9] His most notable work is the Proof of existence of Cannon-Thurston Maps. This led to the resolution of the conjecture that connected limit sets of finitely generated Kleinian groups are locally connected.[10] He is also the author of Maps on boundaries of hyperbolic metric spaces.[11]

Personality

Mahan Maharaj, as he is known to his students and colleagues, is fluent in English, Hindi and Bengali. He also knows a bit of Tamil, learnt from his stay in southern part of India at IMSc, which he shares with his students during lighter moments in classes. He holds a reputation as a charismatic teacher and is reported to enjoy a smoke occasionally.[12] On monkhood, he gets candid: “I am enjoying being a monk as much as I enjoy my mathematics”.[13]

References

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