Bhama Srinivasan (born 22 April 1935) is a mathematician known for her work in the

representation theory of finite groups The representation theory of groups is a part of mathematics which examines how groups act on given structures. Here the focus is in particular on operations of groups on vector spaces. Nevertheless, groups acting on other groups or on sets are ...

. Her contributions were honored with the 1990

Noether Lecture The Noether Lecture is a distinguished lecture series that honors women "who have made fundamental and sustained contributions to the mathematical sciences". The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) established the annual lectures in 1980 as t ...

. She served as president of the

Association for Women in Mathematics The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) is a professional society whose mission is to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity for and the equal treatment o ...

from 1981 to 1983. She earned her Ph.D. in physics in 1959 with her dissertation ''Problems on Modular Representations of Finite Groups'' under J. A. Green at the

University of Manchester , mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity , established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Univer ...

. She currently is a professor at the

University of Illinois at Chicago The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is a Public university, public research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its campus is in the Near West Side, Chicago, Near West Side community area, adjacent to the Chicago Loop. The second campus esta ...

. She has had five doctoral students. She has co-authored a number of papers with Paul Fong in

modular representation theory Modular representation theory is a branch of mathematics, and is the part of representation theory that studies linear representations of finite groups over a field ''K'' of positive characteristic ''p'', necessarily a prime number. As well as ...

and

Deligne–Lusztig theory In mathematics, Deligne–Lusztig theory is a way of constructing linear representations of finite groups of Lie type using ℓ-adic cohomology with compact support, introduced by . used these representations to find all representations of all ...

Early life and education

Srinivasan was born in Madras, India. She attended the

University of Madras The University of Madras (informally known as Madras University) is a public university, public State university (India), state university in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Established in 1857, it is one of the oldest and among the most prestigiou ...

, where she earned her bachelor of arts degree in 1954 and her master of science degree in 1955. She traveled to England for her doctoral study. She remained in England to commence her professional academic career as a lecturer in mathematics at the

University of Keele Keele University, officially known as the University of Keele, is a Public university#United Kingdom, public research university in Keele, approximately from Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, England. Founded in 1949 as the University Coll ...

from 1960 through 1964. She then pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

through the National research Council of Canada from 1965 through 1966.She returned home to India to teach at the Ramanujan Institute of Mathematics of her Alma mater, the

, from 1966 though 1970.

Career

Srinivasan then immigrated to the United States, where she taught for the next decade at

Clark University Clark University is a private research university in Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1887 with a large endowment from its namesake Jonas Gilman Clark, a prominent businessman, Clark was one of the first modern research universities in the ...

in Worcester, Massachusetts, as an associate professor. In 1977, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. That year, she was a member of the

Institute for Advanced Study The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), located in Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholar ...

in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1980, she commenced her longstanding tenure at the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

as a professor of mathematics at the Chicago Circle campus. Srinivasan has distinguished herself in her field throughout her career. In January 1979, she delivered an

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

(AMS) Invited Address "Representations of classical groups" at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Biloxi, Mississippi. She has also been invited to fill visiting professorships internationally at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, the

University of Essen The University of Duisburg-Essen (german: link=no, Universität Duisburg-Essen) is a public research university in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. In the 2019 ''Times Higher Education World University Rankings'', the university was awarded ...

in Germany,

Sydney University The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's six ...

, and the Science University of Tokyo in Japan. She has served as an editor for several journals in her field: ''Proceedings of the AMS'' (from 1983 through 1987); ''Communications in Algebra'' (from 1978 through 1984); ''Mathematical Surveys and Monographs'' (from 1991 through 1993). From 1991 through 1994, she served on the Editorial Boards Committee of the AMS. Srinivasan collaborated with Paul Fong on finite groups of the Lie type, and this work has been linked to Lusztig's research on quantum groups, thus crossing over between mathematics and physics. Although Srinivasan generally advocates pure mathematical research, resisting the temptation to find a practical application for all mathematics, she nevertheless got excited by the application of her research to physics.

Awards and honors

In 2012 she became a fellow of the

. In 2017, she was selected as a fellow of the

in the inaugural class. She is included in a deck of playing cards featuring notable women mathematicians published by the Association of Women in Mathematics.

Selected works

* * *

References

External links

* * Bhama Srinivasan'
author profile
on MathSciNet
Noether Lecture series short biography

Official homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Srinivasan, Bhama Clark University faculty 1935 births Living people Indian women mathematicians American women mathematicians Indian group theorists Alumni of the University of Manchester University of Illinois Chicago faculty Scientists from Chennai Fellows of the American Mathematical Society American people of Indian descent 20th-century Indian mathematicians 21st-century Indian mathematicians 21st-century Indian women scientists 20th-century Indian women scientists Women scientists from Tamil Nadu Fellows of the Association for Women in Mathematics 20th-century women mathematicians 21st-century women mathematicians 21st-century American women