S. Ramanan

Who is S. Ramanan?

S. Ramanan is an Indian mathematician who works in the area of algebraic geometry, moduli spaces and Lie groups. He is one of India's leading mathematicians and internationally recognised as an outstanding expert in Algebraic Geometry, especially in the area of modulii problems. He has also done some very beautiful work in Differential Geometry: His joint paper with M.S. Narasimhan on Universal Connections has been very influential: It enabled S.S. Chern and B. Simons to introduce what is known as the Chern-Simons invariant which has proved useful in Theoretical Physics.

He completed his PhD at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, under the direction of M. S. Narasimhan, with whom he collaborated for decades. He later pursued a lengthy career at TIFR, with many international visits. He picked up the methods of modern differential geometry from the French mathematician Jean-Louis Koszul, and later successfully applied it for his research centred around algebraic geometry. He has also made important contributions to the topics of abelian varieties and also vector bundles.

He was a senior colleague of M. S. Raghunathan and influenced him considerably. Vijay Kumar Patodi who proved part of the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, was found and encouraged by Ramanan, and Patodi's PhD was done under the combined direction of Narasimhan and Ramanan. He has a considerable number of students. Mathematicians influenced by Ramanan include N. Mohan Kumar, Shrawan Kumar, D. S. Nagaraj, Kapil H. Paranjape, Jaya Iyer, Annamalai Ramanathan and several others.