Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian honor, has been given to Indian-American mathematician SR Srinivasa Varadhan, who is regarded as one of the most influential mathematicians in the world.
The government announced on Thursday, January 26 that 83-year-old Varadhan, who was born in Chennai (then Madras), was one of the six recipients of the Padma Vibhushan for “exceptional and distinguished service.” Varadhan is known worldwide for his contributions to probability theory.
Varadhan received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in the country, 15 years ago. He also won the highly prestigious Abel Prize in 2007 for his contributions to probability theory, specifically for developing a unified theory of large deviations. He is also the recipient of this award.
SR Srinivasa Varadhan: Who Is He?
A brilliant and one of the greatest mathematicians from India. Varadhan, who was also referred to as “Raghu” by his co-workers and friends, was born in Chennai in 1940. His parents themselves instilled in him the significance of education. When he accepted the Abel Prize, he stated, “I received constant encouragement from both my parents.
Education always got high priority in our house.”
In high school, he started studying mathematics for the first time. He said in an interview
“An excellent mathematics teacher I had in high school invited some of his best students to his house on Saturday or Sunday to work on additional problems. We didn’t think of these problems as exams; rather, we thought of them as intellectual games we played. It was mostly for fun. That gave me the impression that, like playing chess or solving puzzles, mathematics can be fun. I became interested in mathematics as a result of that attitude, which made mathematics a much more approachable and less intimidating subject.”
Varadhan earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in statistics from the University of Madras. He then went on to become a postdoctoral fellow at the Courant Institute in New York and went on to earn his doctorate from the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata.
After that, in 1966, he was promoted to associate professor, 1968, and 1972, respectively. He also held the position of Director of Courant from 1980 to 1984, and once more from 1992 to 1994.
In addition, he was made a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012, the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2004, the Royal Society in 1998, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2009, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1991.
When interviewer asked Your work on large deviations is regarded as one of the foundations of modern probability theory, and it can be used to predict outlier weather events and insurance risk modeling. Could you please describe the “art of predicting rare events”?
He replied: “A randomness model that calculates the probabilities of various events serves as your foundation. However, estimating the probabilities when they are extremely small is difficult. How can you determine how small it is? Under our model, an event may occur with a low probability. We can make this event with a high probability by changing the model. How much has the model been altered by us? That is measurable. We can optimize the model in a number of possible ways. That gives a more precise indication of how low the probability is. To give you an easy illustration, if you toss a fair coin 1,000 times, how likely is it that you will get 800 heads? 800 heads would be normal if the probability of getting one was 0.8 instead of 0.5. For this issue, how far is 0.8 from 0.5? The purpose is fulfilled by a metric known as relative entropy.”
Taking in the advice and suggestion of Srinivasa Vardhan we can finally conclude that, the first challenge is attempting to prove something. When you achieve, you feel elated for a few days before moving on to the next difficulty. When viewed from above, a pattern emerges, and all the weird parts that down below appeared to be part of [a] grand edifice. Very fulfilling!
