Raise a toast to maths wiz Neena Gupta

Neena Gupta, home-grown mathematician, has been awarded the DST-ICTP-IMU Ramanujan Prize for exceptional work in mathematics by a researcher from a developing country. IMU stands for the International Mathematical Union, the body that hands out the Fields Medal, the 'Maths Nobel'. ICTP is the Italy-based International Centre for Theoretical Physics, and DST is India's own Department of Science and Technology, which decided to fund the prize, after an earlier funder bowed out. This is especially celebratory since mathematics and women are, irrationally, not considered compatible. Gupta's prize corrects this fallacy.

Gupta has been given the award for her work in the areas of affine algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. These are branches of mathematics that developed from the recognition that geometry, say, a point, straight line or curve, can be described by algebra. Those who remember their coordinate geometry from school would get the idea. School geometry is Euclidean geometry, in which distances and angles matter. Affine geometry is geometry in general, of which Euclidean geometry turns out to be a special case with a definite point of origin, from which distances are measured. Mathematics is not always about precise shapes or quantities. Topology, for example, studies what remains unchanged when a shape is deformed, say, when the straight line in the letter D is bent into an arc to transform D into O, or when a coffee mug is deformed into a doughnut. Gupta first became famous for finding the answer to a problem from a special kind of topology named after Oscar Zariski, a Russian-born American mathematician.

India's pool of talent in science, engineering, technology and maths should balloon, as girls shake off, inspired by Gupta, the notion that maths and science are not for them.