Mahan Mj (born Mahan Mitra (

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

: মহান মিত্র), 5 April 1968), also known as Mahan Maharaj and Swami Vidyanathananda, is an Indian mathematician and monk of the

Ramakrishna Order The Ramakrishna Order (Bengali: রামকৃষ্ণ সংঘ) is the monastic lineage that was founded by Sri Ramakrishna, when he gave the ochre cloth of renunciation to twelve of his close disciples, in January 1886 at the Cossipore Hous ...

. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at the

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) is a public deemed research university located in Mumbai, India that is dedicated to basic research in mathematics and the sciences. It is a Deemed University and works under the umbrella of the ...

Mumbai Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the secon ...

. He is a recipient of the 2011

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (SSB) is a science award in India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-la ...

Mathematical Sciences The mathematical sciences are a group of areas of study that includes, in addition to mathematics, those academic disciplines that are primarily mathematical in nature but may not be universally considered subfields of mathematics proper. Statist ...

and the

Infosys Prize The Infosys Prize is an annual award given to scientists, researchers, engineers and social scientists of Indian origin (not necessarily born in India) by the Infosys Science Foundation and ranks among the highest monetary awards in India to r ...

2015 for Mathematical Sciences. He is best known for his work in

hyperbolic geometry In mathematics, hyperbolic geometry (also called Lobachevskian geometry or Bolyai–Lobachevskian geometry) is a non-Euclidean geometry. The parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry is replaced with: :For any given line ''R'' and point ''P ...

geometric group theory Geometric group theory is an area in mathematics devoted to the study of finitely generated groups via exploring the connections between algebraic properties of such group (mathematics), groups and topology, topological and geometry, geometric pro ...

low-dimensional topology In mathematics, low-dimensional topology is the branch of topology that studies manifolds, or more generally topological spaces, of four or fewer dimensions. Representative topics are the structure theory of 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds, knot th ...

and

complex geometry In mathematics, complex geometry is the study of geometric structures and constructions arising out of, or described by, the complex numbers. In particular, complex geometry is concerned with the study of spaces such as complex manifolds and c ...

Early education

Mahan Mitra studied at

St. Xavier's Collegiate School , motto_translation = Nothing Beyond , religious_affiliation = Roman Catholic , denomination = Jesuits , patron = Francis Xavier , established = , session = April–M ...

Calcutta Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, commer ...

, till Class XII. He then entered the

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur) Hindi: भारतीय प्रौद्योगिकी संस्थान कानपुर) is a public institute of technology located in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. It was ...

, with an All India Rank (AIR) of 67 in the

Joint Entrance Examination The Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is an engineering entrance assessment conducted for admission to various engineering colleges in India. It is constituted by two different examinations: the JEE-Main and the JEE-Advanced. The Joint Sea ...

, where he initially chose to study

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

but later switched to mathematics. He graduated with a Masters in mathematics from IIT Kanpur in 1992.

Career

Mahan Mitra joined the PhD program in mathematics at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

, with Andrew Casson as his advisor. He received the

Earle C. Anthony Earle C. Anthony (December 18, 1880—August 6, 1961) was an American businessman and philanthropist based in Los Angeles, California. He worked in broadcasting and automobiles and was also a songwriter, journalist and playwright. Early life ...

Fellowship, U.C. Berkeley in 1992–1993 and the prestigious

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

for 1996–1997. After earning a doctorate from U.C. Berkeley in 1997, he worked briefly at the

Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) (sometimes also referred to as ''Matscience'') is a research centre located in Chennai, India.R. Jagannathan, ''The Institute of Mathematical Sciences'', Resonance (January 1999) vol. 4, no. 1, pp. ...

in 1998. He was Professor of Mathematics and Dean of Research at the

Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute, formerly Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University or simply Vivekananda University, is a education institute deemed-to-be-university headquartered at Belur, West Bengal, w ...

till 2015. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at the

. He has widely published and presented his research in the area of

hyperbolic manifold In mathematics, a hyperbolic manifold is a space where every point looks locally like hyperbolic space of some dimension. They are especially studied in dimensions 2 and 3, where they are called hyperbolic surfaces and hyperbolic 3-manifolds, r ...

s and ending lamination spaces. His most notable work is the proof of existence of

Cannon–Thurston map In mathematics, a Cannon–Thurston map is any of a number of continuous group-equivariant maps between the boundaries of two hyperbolic metric spaces extending a discrete isometric actions of the group on those spaces. The notion originated from a ...

s. This led to the resolution of the conjecture that connected limit sets of finitely generated

Kleinian group In mathematics, a Kleinian group is a discrete subgroup of the group of orientation-preserving isometries of hyperbolic 3-space . The latter, identifiable with , is the quotient group of the 2 by 2 complex matrices of determinant 1 by their ...

s are locally connected. He is also the author of a book titled ''Maps on boundaries of hyperbolic metric spaces''. Mj was an invited speaker at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rena ...

in 2018 in

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a b ...

Personal life

Mj became a monk of the Ramakrishna order in 1998. Mahan Maharaj, as he is known to his students and colleagues, is fluent in English, Hindi and Bengali. He also knows a bit of Tamil, learnt from his stay in southern part of India at IMSc. He has been quoted as saying, "I am enjoying being a monk as much as I enjoy my mathematics".

References

External links

*
rkmvu.ac.inThe Monk Who is Sold on GeometryMahan Mitra (BT/EE/1969)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mj, Mahan Living people IIT Kanpur alumni 20th-century Indian mathematicians 21st-century Indian mathematicians 1968 births Monks of the Ramakrishna Mission Topologists University of California, Berkeley alumni Group theorists Tata Institute of Fundamental Research faculty Recipients of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Mathematical Science Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute faculty Bengali mathematicians Indian mathematicians 21st-century Bengalis Scientists from West Bengal