Mathematician and faculty member of T(ISI) Professor Neena Gupta has become the fourth Indian to win the Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians.
Gupta was awarded the 2021 DST-ICTP-IMU Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians from Developing Countries for her outstanding work in affine algebraic geometry and commutative algebra.
She is also the third woman to receive the Ramanujan Award, the Ministry of Science and Technology said. Of the four Indians who have been given this award, three are faculty members of the Indian Statistical Institute.
The Ramanujan Prize is given internationally to young mathematicians under the age of 45 to make a mark in the field. It was first granted in 2005 and is administered by the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) jointly by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India and the International Mathematical Union (IMU).
The DST-ICTP-IMU Ramanujan Prize Committee, composed of eminent mathematicians from around the world, commented that Gupta’s work shows ‘impressive algebraic skill and inventiveness’. Earlier Gupta has been awarded Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2019.
In 2014, she earned the Indian National Academy of Sciences’ Young Scientist Award for her solution to the Zariski cancellation problem, a fundamental problem in algebraic geometry. Her solution was described as ‘one of the best works in algebraic geometry done anywhere in recent years’.
A student of Khalsa High School, Dunlop, Gupta took mathematics as her calling from a very young age. She graduated from Bethune College and did her Masters and PhD from ISI, where she soon joined as a faculty member.