Category: Alumni

#s 4, 5 and 7: A UoH triple play

Untitled 2For reasons that are truly too dreary to get into, I had to spend a little time on the Web of Knowledge, that useful (but often dangerous!) engine of discovery.  Again, for reasons too dreary to elaborate, I thought I would find out which scientific contributions from India were most significant in terms of their impact. Each of these terms is loaded, of course, but here are the filters that I applied.

  • I searched for papers that were published from India between 1 January 1999 and today. This amounted to a total of 540,649 publications in all.
  • I removed all papers from this list where one or more authors was from the USA, bringing the number down to 515,720. (That’s 24929 collaborative publications between the countries in the past 15 years. Not a lot.)
  • I further pruned the list by removing papers where there were coauthors from the UK, Japan, Germany, Switzerland and Russia. This brought the total to 484,153. (5 countries, 15 years, 31567 papers. Really not a lot.)
  • Since one needs a valid subscription to the Web of Knowledge to see the results, I’ve put up a snapshot of the results page above, using the feature in WoK of ranking papers by “Times Cited”. This can tell you which papers have been cited maximally by other researchers.
  • Judging impact by this indicator, it turns out that the paper with most impact that is purely “from India” is the 2002 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION publication,  A fast and elitist multiobjective genetic algorithm: NSGA-II by K. Deb,  A. Pratap, S. Agarwal and T. Meyarivan. Its been cited an impressive 5574 times.

What is really quite remarkable, and a matter of justifiable pride, is that the School of Chemistry of our University figures thrice in the top 10 papers in the list. The 2003 Chem. Rev. paper by  Basavaiah, Roy and Satyanarayana, the 2002 Acc. Chem. Res. paper by Desiraju, and a 2002 paper by Kotha, Lahiri and Kashinath in Tetrahedron figure at Nos. 4, 5 and 7. While Profs. Basavaiah and Desiraju were  on the faculty when these papers were written of course (and Prof. DB continues to be with us), Prof. Kotha of the IIT Powai is an alumnus, having earned both the M. Sc. and the Ph. D. from the UoH, in 1979 and 1985 respectively.

Some caveats. Of course, in this age of globalization the “from India” tag is not necessarily prized, and in any case it can be quite irrelevant as to which ideas are truly from India. Most cited is also not necessarily the most significant work, and a longer sense of history is needed to judge significance. In journal terms, the word impact has its own connotations, mostly negative, but still.
All this apart, its quite nice to see our work up there in the rankings. The institutional affiliations of other authors on the top 10 papers (to further normalize the list) include the IITs (Kanpur, Mumbai, and Roorkee), IUCAA (Pune), IISc (Bangalore), JNCASR (Bangalore), and JNU (New Delhi).

Pretty good company to keep.

Going back

LoyolaIMG_0489I studied at Loyola College, Madras from 1969 to1972 when I graduated with a B. Sc. in Chemistry. Until last week, when two events took me back there, I had not returned, though I have kept in occasional touch with several of my classmates and many other batch-mates. My years at Loyola were formative, although I should admit that in the callowness of youth, I did not always appreciate just how crucial the discipline of the institution- as well as the freedom it gave me- were. As was the early exposure to a research environment that had nurtured (and been nurtured by) great scholars like Fr. L M Yedannapalli, the physical chemist, and the mathematician, Fr. C Racine – apart from the presence of superb teachers like Klaus Bechtloff, Emmanuel Raja, A V Ramaswamy and N S Gnanapragasam, among others. We keep discussing now whether we should have teachers from outside India in our Universities, but at such institutions then this was not considered much of an issue- Racine was French, Bechtloff was German, and I can also remember an excellent course of lectures on quantum mechanics given by a visiting Belgian, M Mareschal (on the invitation of Dr Gnanapragasam) that was open to all chemistry majors. As I realize more now, those were the good times.

UntitledWhat took me back after all these years was the special ceremony that we organized in order to deliver the Doctor of Science (honoris causa) degree that we had awarded the eminent mathematician C. S. Seshadri  in 2012. A collateral advantage was that the same ceremony, we were able to give David Mumford the D. Sc. (h. c.) that we had awarded in 2011. Neither of them is able to travel to Hyderabad to receive the doctorate, so we did the next best thing and went to Loyola College, Chennai. As it happens, Seshadri is an alumnus (as is M S Narasimhan, the other eminent mathematician whom we honoured in 2012 and who spent a few days at UoH in October last year) so it made a lot of sense for us to have the function in the recently built LS Hall at Loyola. A number of eminent mathematicians and other colleagues from a number of institutions- Madras University, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, IIT Madras, Chennai Mathematical Institute, Central University of Tamil Nadu- were there. The ceremony was just about two hours long, and included, in addition to the citation and the degree award, a short seminar on Seshadri’s work and an appreciation of the mentorship of the Rev. Fr. C Racine.

img01Racine was the moving force that inspired generations of bright students to go into mathematics research. Ordained as a Jesuit priest in1929, he obtained a Ph D in mathematics in Paris in 1934, studying with the finest: his mentors were Élie Cartan and Hadamard and his friends included André Weil and Henri Cartan. From 1939 till his death in 1976, Racine was in Loyola, and I recall seeing him walking in the grounds when I was a student (though he had stopped teaching after his retirement in 1967). Prof. Narasimhan gave a memoir and appreciation of Racine at the function, and here is what I gathered from that talk.

Father Racine had worked with the French mathematicians Hadamard and  Élie Cartan and counted among his friends Andre Weil and  Henri Cartan among others. More importantly, Racine was well acquainted with the then current trends in mathematics and brought three things to Loyola College, and to Madras University. The first was a new mode of teaching- no rote, no static lectures, a new style of presentation and discussion that engaged the student. The second was the introduction of new courses at the higher levels- something that Madras University had not heard of, a flexible curriculum! And finally, the most important- Racine encouraged his students to go beyond, to find the best places that they could do mathematics in. And so a number of them went to TIFR: K. G. Ramanathan, C. S. Seshadri, M. S. Narasimhan, Raghavan Narasimhan, C. P. Ramanujam…. As well as those who went elsewhere, and that list is even longer… 

IMG_0488Going back to Loyola was one way of acknowledging debts, and it reminded me of the Princeton alumni  song, “Going Back to Nassau Hall”, the notes of which ring loud every June on the Princeton campus when the alumni gather.  6 April was also the 88th College Day, so I was able to return to Bertram Hall (which I had last seen in 1972 when I wrote the B Sc final paper for Inorganic Chemistry, with sweat flowing freely down my forearm…). The tradition of a strong alumni group, that meets and remembers the value that the institution adds to education is very important, and a good way of recalling ones debts to one’s alma mater. And American universities have learned well to capitalize on the goodwill of this group, the Alumni.

At the UoH we are only slowly beginning to  realise the value of forming Alumni Associations and fostering an external support group for the University- after all, the Alumni are the one group that has the highest interest in the standards of the UoH! We recently had Dr Ch Mohan Rao, Director of the CCMB come and share his experiences with us, and earlier, Sri R V Balaram of the IRS did so too. We need to have more of our old students come back and tell us what makes the UoH such an enabling environment, and how we can make it better. I’m sure we already have enough illustrious alumni who can show us just how much can be achieved… We have an Alumni Cell at the University- do write in with your suggestions, here.