S. Ramanan

S Ramanan
Born	1937
Nationality	India
Fields	algebraic geometry, moduli spaces, Lie groups
Institutions	Chennai Mathematical Institute, Chennai Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai
Alma mater	Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda College, Chennai
Doctoral advisor	MS Narasimhan
Notable awards	Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, Ramanujan Medal, Third World Academy of Sciences Prize for Mathematics

In this Indian name, the name Sundararaman is a patronymic, not a family name, and the person should be referred to by the given name, Ramanan.

S (Sundararaman) Ramanan (born 20 July 1937) 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 MS Narasimhan on universal connections has been very influential: It enabled (among other things) SS Chern and B Simons to introduce what is known as the Chern-Simons invariant, which has proved useful in theoretical physics.

The honours awarded to Professor Ramanan include the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, India's highest science prize, in 1979, the Third World Academy of Sciences Prize for Mathematics in 2001 and the Ramanujan Medal in 2010.

He is the nephew of the Sanskrit scholar and Vedanta expert, the late Ramachandra Dikshitar, who was a professor at the Banaras Hindu University. Professor Ramanan is also a great aficionado and an amateur singer of Carnatic music.

He is an alumnus of the Ramakrishna Mission School in Chennai and the Vivekananda College in Chennai, where he completed a BA Honours in mathematics, standing second in mathematics and first in English among students of the science stream in the final exams in what was then Madras Presidency. He completed his PhD at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, under the direction of MS Narasimhan, with whom he collaborated for decades. He did his post-doctoral studies at Oxford University, Harvard University and ETH Zurich.

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 on 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.

He was very close to, and has closely collaborated with, many Western mathematicians of note, like the late Raoul Bott, who was at Harvard University. While in TIFR as distinguished professor, he was one of the important figures in the school of mathematics in India. He now continues his contributions via teaching at the Chennai Mathematical Institute, where he is adjunct professor, and the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.

He is a great lecturer and expositor. He has written the book Moduli of Abelian Varieties with Allan Adler, published by Springer-Verlag, and a graduate-level book on algebraic geometry called Global Calculus, published by the American Mathematical Society.

He has been a visiting professor at many of the world's leading universities, including Harvard University, University of California at Berkeley, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, UCLA, Oxford University, Cambridge University, the Max Planck Institute and University of Paris. In 1978 he gave one of the prestigious 50-minute invited talks at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki, and has also been a speaker at many major international conferences. In 1999, he was extended the privilege of speaking on some aspects of the work of André Weil, one of the greatest mathematicians of 20th century, on the occasion of his being awarded the prestigious Inamouri Prize.

He is married to Anuradha Ramanan and has two daughters. The first is Sumana Ramanan, who is a journalist and editor, now a consulting editor at Scroll.in, a digital daily, and previously a senior editor and readers' editor at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai. She is married to Jaikumar Radhakrishnan, a theoretical computer scientist. The second daughter is Kavita Ramanan, who is also a noted mathematician, a professor of applied mathematics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, and a recipient of the international Erlang Prize for outstanding contributions to applied probability, in 2006.