K. R. Sreenivasan

Who is K. R. Sreenivasan?

Katepalli R. Sreenivasan is an engineer and leader in international scholarship. He was appointed the president of Polytechnic Institute of New York University on April.10th 2013.

Born in 1947, he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bangalore University and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where he was awarded a doctorate in aerospace engineering in 1975 working with Prof. Roddam Narasimha. Following two years of post-doctoral study in Sydney and Newcastle, Australia, he traveled to the United States to serve as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and then joined the faculty at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut in 1979, where he was the Harold W. Cheel professor of mechanical engineering and professor of physics, applied physics and mathematics. There he served, for a long time, as chairman of Mechanical Engineering.

At Yale, he had a close collaboration with Benoit Mandelbrot in developing theories of fractals and multifractals and their applications to turbulence. His crowning achievement was the development of multifractal theories, published in the landmark 1990 article "Joint multifractal measures: theory and applications to turbulence".