Kolkata’s Neena Gupta wins Ramanujan Prize

Professor Neena Gupta, a Mathematician from Kolkata and faculty member of Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata has become the fourth Indian to win Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians this year. The Ministry of Science and Technology has also informed that she is the third woman to receive this prestigious award. Out of the four Indians who have been awarded this prize, three of them are faculty members of the Indian Statistical Institute.

Gupta was awarded the ‘2021 DST-ICTP-IMU Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians from developing countries’ for her outstanding work in affine algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. The Ramanujan Prize is given internationally to young mathematicians under the age of 45, for breaking new ground in the field. It was first awarded in 2005 and is administered by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) jointly with the Department of Science and Technology (DST) Government of India and the International Mathematical Union (IMU).

The DST-ICTP-IMU Ramanujan Prize committee, composed of eminent mathematicians from around the world, and they commented that Gupta’s work ‘shows impressive algebraic skill and inventiveness.’ Gupta was also the recipient of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in 2019. In 2014, she earned the Young Scientists Award of the Indian National Science Academy for her solution to the Zariski cancellation problem, a fundamental problem in Algebraic Geometry. Her solution was described as ‘one of the best works in algebraic geometry in recent years done anywhere.’

Gupta was raised in Kolkata and still lives here. She was a student of Khalsa High School, Dunlop, and since a very young age, found mathematics to be her calling. She went on to graduate from Bethune College and did her Masters and PhD from ISI, where she soon joined as a faculty member. We are all proud of this young mathematician who puts Bengal on the world knowledge bank once again.