Sugata Mitra (born 12 February 1952) is an Indian
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...
and
educational theorist. He is best known for his
"Hole in the Wall" experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is Professor Emeritus at NIIT University, Rajasthan, India. A Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he retired in 2019 as Professor of Educational Technology at
Newcastle University
Newcastle University (legally the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a UK public research university based in Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England. It has overseas campuses in Singapore and Malaysia. The university is a red brick unive ...
in England, after 13 years there including a year in 2012 as visiting professor at MIT MediaLab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He won the
TED Prize 2013.
Background
Mitra was born in a
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 ...
family in
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, comm ...
, India on 12 February 1952.
Early scientific work
After earning a PhD in Solid State Physics from the
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, during which time h
publishedseveral papers on organic semiconductors, he went on to research battery technology at the Centre for Energy Studies in the IIT, and later at the
Technische Universität
A ''Technische Hochschule'' (, plural: ''Technische Hochschulen'', abbreviated ''TH'') is a type of university focusing on engineering sciences in Germany. Previously, it also existed in Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands (), and Finland (, ). ...
, Vienna. He published a paper on a zinc-chlorine battery
and a speculative paper on why the human
sense organs are located where they are.
He then worked setting up networked computers and creat