Mahan Mj

Mahan Mj (born April 5, 1968 as Mahan Mitra, Bengali মহান মিত্র ) is an Indian mathematician and monk ( Ramakrishna Math Order).

He is also known as Mahan Maharaj and his monk name Swami Vidyanathananda (from 2008).

Mahan Mj grew up in Calcutta, where he attended St. Xavier's Collegiate School and his father was a company manager. He studied electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and then switched to mathematics. After completing his master's degree in 1992, he went to the University of California, Berkeley and received his doctorate in 1997 with Andrew Casson ( Maps on Boundaries of Hyperbolic Metric Spaces ). As a post-doctoral student he was at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai in 1998 , but then joined the Ramakrishna Math Order. He made the decision to become a monk in Berkeley. Originally he had more atheistic views, as he said in an interview, but what attracted him to monasticism was the concentration on fundamental ethical values ​​such as truth and selflessness. Until 2015 he was a professor at the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University in Belur Math . He was then a professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research .

He deals with hyperbolic manifolds . In 2014 he proved the existence of Cannon-Thurston maps . From this he concluded that connected limit sets of finitely generated Klein groups are locally connected .

In 2011 he received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in Mathematics and in 2015 the Infosys Prize.

He is invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro 2018 (Cannon-Thurston maps).

In an interview, he complains about the outdated teaching methods in the field of mathematics in India, where completely outdated textbooks are still used, especially in schools and lower grades of universities, the emphasis is placed on mastering the teaching material presented there and the asking of questions is systematically prevented . The teachers, too, would often teach the same material for twenty years without considering innovations. The "prehistoric" way of mathematics education in India leads he attributed that Indians love to be "lazy" . He saw exceptions in only a few elite universities (such as the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Chennai Mathematical Institute or the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research and some central universities such as those in Delhi, Hyderabad and Punjab). With the prize money from the Infosys Prize, he finances an initiative to improve mathematics teaching in India, working with his theoretical physicist friend Rajesh Gopakumar .

In his spare time he loves classical Indian music , especially ragas in the Kedar and Yaman styles.

Web links

• Website at Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University, web archive
• 'At a larger level ... asking questions is not encouraged' , Interview The Telegraph, February 21, 2016

Individual evidence

1. ^ Mahan Mitra: Maps on Boundaries of Hyperbolic Metric Spaces . Ed .: University of California at Berkeley. 1992 (English, online (.ps) ).
2. ↑ Mahan Mj in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
3. ↑ Mahan Mj: Cannon-Thurston maps for surface groups . In: Annals of Mathematics . tape 179 , no. 1 , 2014, p. 1–80 , doi : 10.4007 / annals.2014.179.1.1 (English).
4. ↑ Arxiv
5. ^ The Telegraph, February 21, 2016, on the occasion of the award of the Infosys Prize.
6. ↑ He mentions Sydney Luxton Loney as an example, The elements of statics and dynamics, Cambridge UP 1902, 1904