The much awaited Bhatnagar Prizes for 2011 were announced yesterday, and it is absolutely thrilling to see my colleague and friend Prof. U. Ramamurty among the awardees. [The list is here (pdf); the previous year's lists are available at this page]
And it's great to see a couple of other familiar names in the list: Prof. S. Balasubramanian, a friend from JNCASR, Bangalore, and Prof. K.N. Balaji, a colleague in the Department of Microbiology and Cell Biology at IISc.
Hearty congratulations to them, and to the other Bhatnagar awardees from elsewhere.
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Update: One of the Prize winners in math has a very interesting background -- see Swarup's post: A Swamiji Wins Bhatnagar Prize.
2 Comments:
Abi,
Vivekananda University located in Belur Math is a small developing university and I enjoyed visiting it. At the moment, they have three small departments in Mathematics, Computer Science and Theoretical Physics. There are all kinds of monks and some of them like Mahan are a lot of fun. There was one monk who apparently as a student beat up a contractor who was exploiting labourers and later joined the mission. I also saw a jewish monk; apparently there are some muslim monks too. One could not smoke in the campus but could smoke in one's room and Mahan often visited my room to smoke and gossip. Somehow, the idea of celibacy did not appeal to me and I felt that young healthy guys like Mahan were missing a very interesting part of life and used to show him videos attractive females singing like
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgwfvDh7cPc
He would just smile and walk away and sometimes told me stories of lapsed monks. In any case, it was fun to visit for and I could work very easily there after years of retirement. I would like to urge rsearchers to visit the placs and encourage the young researchers.
I have known Mahan a little since around 1986 (he will not remember me) and it is fair to say that crown jewels like him are very very rare indeed, and this comment is not just about his formidable brain.
Recipients like Rajesh, Mahan, Shiraj or Manindra are somewhat embarrassing to the Bhatnagar prize itself. It's almost as if the prize legitimizes itself by being conferred on these people, and then bestows reflected prestige on many others.
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