Educational Experience

Graduate School, Purdue University (1981-1987) : I graduated in 1987 from Purdue University. My thesis adviser was Prof. Bill Heinzer. I learnt a lot from him and from Craig Huneke in a series of 12 courses and seminars that they offered at Purdue. My thesis was about topologies defined by powers and symbolic powers of ideals. During those days of struggle, Jack Ratliff took keen interest in my work. While I was at Purdue, I was fortunate to be a member of the commutative algebra group. There was a tremendous amount of activity during those days. I was exposed to Hilbert functions, Rees algebras, form rings and mixed multiplicities in many student seminars we used to have at Purdue every week. Some of my contemporaries were Sam Huckaba, Bernie Johnston, Tom Marley, Kishor Shah, K. N. Raghavan, Kyung Ho Oh, and Sun Sook Noh.

Birla Institute of Technology and Science (1975-1981): I joined BITS, Pilani in July 1975 as a National Science Talent Scholar to pursue a five year integrated degree in M. Sc. I dropped the academic year 1976-77 due to ill health and rejoined in 1977. I graduated in 1981. For the first two years, the students in engineering and science did exactly the same courses. So I did 4 courses in Physics, three in chemistry and several in engineering such as workshop, engineering drawing, circuit theory, thermodynamics. The teachers of Mathematics courses were some of the best teachers I have ever heard: V. Krishnamurthy, VP Mainra, JL Arora, MS Radhakrishnan, TS Ravishankar, PK Raman and D. Tamhankar. I particularly enjoyed the Physics courses in the first two years: EM Theory, Classical Mechanics, Waves and vibrations, quantum Mechanics. Later on I took a course on Statistical Physics which was taught by HM Ghule. I clearly remember the day when he derived the Chadrasekhar limit for the mass of a star which decided whether it will become a black hole.