| Mahan Mitra | |
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Mahan Mitra
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| 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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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]
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]
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]
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