Plenary Speakers

Neela Natraj

Neela Nataraj works as a Professor in Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and is currently the Head of the department. She completed her Ph.D. from Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in the year 1998. After working in IIT Delhi for 3 years, she joined IIT Bombay in the year 2003. Some of her areas of research interest are finite element methods, finite volume methods and discontinuous Galerkin methods for linear and nonlinear elliptic problems. She has around 50 research publications in international journals. She has been the recipient of the IIT Bombay Excellence in Teaching Award in the years 2008 and 2012 and the S.P. Sukatme Excellence in Teaching Award, IIT Bombay in the year 2016.

Madhu Raka

Professor Madhu Raka is a distinguished mathematician in the Department of Mathematics, Panjab University, Chandigarh. Madhu Raka won the University gold medals for standing first in her Bachelors and in her Masters. She did her Ph.D. from Panjab University under the guidance of Professor R. J. Hans-Gill in 1979. She was awarded Commonwealth Post‐Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, UK for one year (1979-1980). For her research work, she was awarded the Indian National Science Academy’s Young Scientist Award in 1985. She was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, Allahabad in 2008. She has been an invited speaker at several national and international conferences in India and abroad. She joined this University in 1978 as Research Assistant and retired as Professor in Nov., 2013. At present, she is working as Professor (Re-employed) in the Department of Mathematics, Panjab University. She was Chairperson, Department of Mathematics from March 2006 to Feb. 2009, Dean Research from Sept. 2012 to April 2013 and Dean University Instruction from April 2013 to Nov. 2013. She also served as Advisor and Secretary to Vice Chancellor from July 2014 to Feb. 2015.

Professor Madhu Raka has done commendable research work in the area of Geometry of Numbers and Algebraic Coding Theory. She has published more than 50 research papers in national and international journals. She has guided three Ph.D. students, another one is working at present. She, along with R. J. Hans-Gill, edited ‘Collected Works of Hansraj Gupta’ Vol I-II published by Ramanujan Mathematical Society. She has contributed substantially towards the proof of Watson’s conjecture on non-homogeneous indefinite quadratic forms. Professor Raka, jointly with others, settled Woods’ Conjecture for n=7, 8 & 9, proving thereby the longstanding Conjecture of Minkowski on the product of n non-homogeneous linear forms for n=7, 8 & 9. Due to this work, a lot of activity has been generated in this field. With efforts of Professor Raka an active research group in Algebraic Coding Theory has been created in the Department of Mathematics. This group has obtained several interesting results on irreducible cyclic codes, polyadic codes, constacyclic codes, self-dual and self-orthogonal negacyclic codes, quadratic residue codes, duadic codes and their extensions. Using this theory, they constructed many good codes with the help of algebra software Magma.

Vijaylakshmi Trivedi

Prof. Trivedi received her Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Mumbai. At present she is a faculty member in the School of Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (Mumbai). The areas of her interest are commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. In the past she has worked on Bertini theorems, Hilbert functions and Frobenius splittings. For the last several years, she has been working on Hilbert-Kunz multiplicity theory, which is related to singularity theory in characteristic p.

R. Parimala

Recipient of prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award(1987), Prof Parimala is an Indian Mathematician known for her contribution in the field of Algebra. She is the Arts & Sciences distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Emory University. For many years, she was a professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai. She received her M.Sc. from Madras University in 1970 and Ph.D. from the University of Mumbai in 1976.