Mahan Maharaj (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 Mj 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 Ramakrishna Paramhansa, when he gave the ochre cloth of renunciation to twelve of his close disciples, in January 1886 at the Cossip ...

. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at the

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) is a leading research Institute under the Department of Atomic Energy of the Government of India. It is a public deemed university located at Navy Nagar, Colaba in Mumbai. It also has a centres in ...

Mumbai Mumbai ( ; ), also known as Bombay ( ; its official name until 1995), is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra. Mumbai is the financial capital and the most populous city proper of India with an estimated population of 12 ...

. He is a recipient of the 2011

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award Shanti or Shanthi may refer to: In Sanskrit * Inner peace, a state of being mentally and spiritually at peace, with enough knowledge and understanding to keep oneself strong in the face of discord or stress * Kshanti, one of the paramitas of Bud ...

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. Statisti ...

and the

Infosys Prize The Infosys Prize is an annual award granted 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 for researc ...

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

hyperbolic geometry In mathematics, hyperbolic geometry (also called Lobachevskian geometry or János Bolyai, Bolyai–Nikolai Lobachevsky, Lobachevskian geometry) is a non-Euclidean geometry. The parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry is replaced with: :For a ...

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 groups and topological and geometric properties of spaces on which these group ...

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 theory of 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds, knot theory, ...

and

complex geometry In mathematics, complex geometry is the study of geometry, geometric structures and constructions arising out of, or described by, the complex numbers. In particular, complex geometry is concerned with the study of space (mathematics), spaces su ...

Early education

Mahan Mitra studied at

St. Xavier's Collegiate School St. Xavier's Collegiate School (informally SXCS) is a private Catholic primary and secondary school for boys, located in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. The school was founded in 1860 by the Jesuits under the supervision of Fr. Henri Depelchin S.J. ...

Calcutta Kolkata, also known as Calcutta (List of renamed places in India#West Bengal, its official name until 2001), is the capital and largest city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of West Bengal. It lies on the eastern ba ...

, till Class XII. He then entered the

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT- Kanpur or IIT-K) is a public institute of technology located in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. As an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), it was declared an Institute of National Importance by ...

, 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 comprises two different examinations: the JEE-Main and the JEE-Advanced. The Joint Seat Allocat ...

, 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 that 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 university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, with

Andrew Casson Andrew John Casson FRS (born 1943) is a mathematician, studying geometric topology. Casson is the Philip Schuyler Beebe Professor of Mathematics at Yale University. Education and career Casson was educated at Latymer Upper School and Trinity C ...

as his advisor. He received the Earle C. Anthony 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 an education institute deemed-to-be-university headquartered at Belur, West Bengal, ...

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, res ...

s and ending lamination spaces. His most notable work is the proof of existence of Cannon–Thurston maps. 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 (mathematics), group of orientation-preserving Isometry, isometries of hyperbolic 3-space . The latter, identifiable with PSL(2,C), , is the quotient group of the 2 by 2 complex ...

s are locally connected. He is also the author of a book titled ''Maps on boundaries of hyperbolic metric spaces''. In 2017, he became a laureate of the

Asian Scientist 100 The Asian Scientist 100 is an annually published list of 100 prize-winning Asian researchers, academicians, innovators and business leaders from across the Asia-Pacific region and a range of scientific disciplines. Recipients "must have received ...

by the ''

Asian Scientist ''Asian Scientist'' is an English language science and technology magazine published in Singapore. History and profile ''Asian Scientist'' was launched as a blog in March 2011 by Juliana Chan. The blog's popularity eventually led to a partnersh ...

''. 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 IMU Abacus Medal (known before ...

in 2018 in

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, or simply Rio, is the capital of the Rio de Janeiro (state), state of Rio de Janeiro. It is the List of cities in Brazil by population, second-most-populous city in Brazil (after São Paulo) and the Largest cities in the America ...

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.in Website of Mahan Mjmathweb.tifr.res.in Website of Mahan MjThe 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 Academic staff of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Recipients of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Mathematical Science Academic staff of Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute Bengali mathematicians 21st-century Bengalis Scientists from West Bengal