L. Mahadevan

L. Mahadevan

L. Mahadevan ( Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan ; * 1965 ) is an Indian applied mathematician, biologist and engineer.

Mahadevan studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (Bachelor 1986) and the University of Texas at Austin (Master’s degree 1987). He then switched to mathematics with a master's degree at Stanford University in 1992. In 1995 he received his doctorate there under Joseph B. Keller . He was then an assistant professor and later an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering. From 2001 he was Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College. From 2003 he was Professor of Applied Mathematics ( Lola England de Valpine Professor ) and in the Faculty of Biology at Harvard University , as well as in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School . He is there at the Wyss Institute and the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science.

Since 2004 he has also been a regular visiting professor at Oxford University and a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He was also visiting scholar at the École normal supérieure (ENS), the Universities of Nice and Marseille, the University of Chicago (with Leo Kadanoff ), the University of California, Berkeley (as Miller Professor), at the National Center for Biological Sciences des Tata Institute in Bangalore and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign .

Mahadevan is particularly concerned with mathematical questions of biomechanics and biological form (such as plant leaves, insect wings). Among other things, he applies this to the design of prostheses and investigated various phenomena such as the flapping of flags in the wind, the snapping of Venus flytraps , movement in morphogenesis , the interaction of biochemical and mechanical properties in biopolymers or the shrinking of the skin.

In 2000 he received the Edgerton Award from MIT and the George Ledlie Prize at Harvard. 2006 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and a 2009 MacArthur Fellow . In 2001 he held the Condorcet Professorship at the ENS and held the GI Taylor Lecture of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 2001 and the Alan Tayler Lecture in Oxford in 2003. In 2016 he was elected a member of the Royal Society .

Web links

• Website at the Applied Math Lab at Harvard
• Website at the Wyss Institute
• Honored from the MacArthur Foundation

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Interview in the Boston Globe, October 6, 2008, where the age is given as 43