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M. Ramesh

The Director of Chennai Mathematical Institute, Prof C. S. Seshadri.

CHENNAI, Oct. 2

THERE is nothing quite so paradoxically charming as well as scary, as a mass of equations on the blackboard. Like the sex appeal of an unattainable film star, the intellectual allure of mathematics keeps one always in attempt to conquer, but never allows him a complete victory. You solve one problem, another pops up before you.

But the beauty of mathematics is that it requires very little infrastructure. You have a desk, a pen and a sheaf of scribble sheets and a love for the subject, you are a mathematician. At least for this reason, it is eminently suited for Indians to achieve excellence of global standards — unlike, say, physics or chemistry, where considerable infrastructure (labs, equipment, computers and so on) is required.

Yet, while India has produced a clutch of outstanding mathematicians, mathematics seems to be losing sheen. The Indian `grey matter' seems to be bent towards areas such as engineering and IT, which afford better job opportunities. You can't really blame them. But surely something has to be done, to restore maths to its rightful place on the intellectual ladder.

The decade-old Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) hopes to be the change agent. The environment has changed, the Director of CMI, Prof C.S. Seshadri, said. "A well trained mathematician is not like he was in the olden days — he is today a highly saleable commodity."

Mathematicians are in demand not only in highly specialised areas such as space science, and robotics, but also in more day-to-day fields such as banking and financial management.

So, the Institute sees for itself a role in developing a crop of highly skilled mathematicians. The CMI runs a 6-semester under-graduate (B.Sc Hons), post-graduate, doctoral and post-doctoral courses, only for students who are very keen on mathematics, handpicked through a competitive entrance examination.

The degrees are awarded by the Bhoj (Open) University, Bhopal. So far, 10 researchers have obtained their doctorates through the CMI and currently, nine more are doing their PhD here. In all, about 60 students are undergoing training at various stages.

Under a MoU with the Ecole Normal Superieure, Paris (one of the leading institutions in the world for teaching and research in mathematics), the CMI also has an exchange programme up and running.

Now, the CMI is on an expansion programme. It wants to scale it up to a stage where it could have 150 students a year. This, obviously, calls for some serious funding.

The CMI was in fact born out of private funding. It began as a `School of Mathematics' under the SPIC Science Foundation. Since the School's inception in 1989 and till 2000, SPIC met a good part of its running expenses. The company, according to Dr Seshadri, would have spent some Rs 5 crore.

Of course, other agencies also chipped in. Notable among them are the Government-owned National Board for Higher Mathematics (which, for some strange reason, comes under the Department of Atomic Energy), ISRO, the DRDO and the Chennai-based Shriram group.

The working capital works out to Rs 1 crore a year — the money is spent on `student support' (stipend and housing) and compensation to faculty. "If the students are to be made to stay in mathematics, they have to be supported," says Mr R. Thyagarajan of the Shriram group, which has so far given Rs 50 lakh to the CMI.

According to Mr K. Madhava Sarma, Advisor, CMI, the expansion would call for about Rs 5 crore for the physical infrastructure and building a corpus of Rs 2 crore for the future running expenses. Again, SPIC has offered support — it has promised a piece of land near Chennai.

For the rest of the money, the CMI is in the process of preparing `an appeal' to the private sector. "For the CMI to be entirely independent, the funding has to come necessarily from the private sector," Mr Thyagarajan said.

CMI, which started off as an institution for research into pure mathematics, has had to turn its attention to applied mathematics as well, for financial reasons. (However, Prof Seshadri disagrees that this is swerving away from the institute's objectives).

Now, the CMI is `opening divisions' for research into mathematics in IT security and cyrptography, applied physics and financial management. ICICI has approached CMI to train its officers in financial mathematics. More such `jobs' are on the horizon.

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