Welcome to My Homepage

Academic activities - A brief profile:

I am  Dr. M. Thamban Nair, Visiting Professor at BIRS Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus, after superannuation as Professor of Mathematics at IIT Madras. I have been a research mathematician and a teacher for over 35 years for postgraduate and undergraduate level mathematics courses.

I had my school education in my home-village Udma in Kasaragod District (Kerala), B.Sc. from Government College Kasaragod, and M.Sc. from University of Calicut. I was college topper in B.Sc., and first rank holder in M.Sc.

I  did Ph.D. from IIT Bombay under the guidance of Prof. B.V. Limaye, and I was a Post Doctoral Fellow, under the French Government Scholarship, at University of Grenoble (France) with Prof. P.J. Laurent as mentor.

After returning from France, I joined as a Research Scientist at IIT Bombay for a year under a DST-sponsored project with Prof. M.C. Joshi as principal investigator,  and then from February 1987  to December 1995, I worked as Lecturer and Reader at Goa University. From December 1995 on wards, I have been with IIT Madras, as Assistant Professor (1995-1996), Associate Professor (1996-2004), and Professor from 2004, until my superannuation on June 30, 2022.

The broad area of my research is in the domain of Applicable Functional Analysis; Specifically,  

• Spectral approximation, 

• Operator equations, 

• Inverse & ill-posed problems. 

I have over 90 journal publications and 5 books to my credit. 

Awards which I received  include

• French Government Fellowship to do Post Doctoral Research, University of Grenoble, France.

• C.L. Chandana Award of the Indo-Canadian Mathematics Foundation for distinguished and outstanding contributions in mathematics research and teaching in India for the year 2003.

• DAAD Visiting Professorship at University of Kaiserslautern, 

• 12th Ganesh Prasad memorial Award lecture of the Indian Mathematical Society for the year 2015.

• B K Master Memorial National Excellence Award  for contributions in the filed of higher education, by Udma Educational Trust October 24, 2016 

I was a Visiting Professor at 

• Australian National University, Canberra (Australia), 

• University of Kaiserslautern (Germany), 

• Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou (China), 

• University of Saint Etienne (France), 

• Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS), Berlin (Germany). 

I gave several invited talks at various conferences in India and abroad (France, Germany, Ausria, Australia, China, Russia), and also as a mentor of INSPIRE Program of DST at various colleges in India.

The administrative positions that I held at IIT Madras include  Vice-Chairman & Chairman of GATE/JAM (2004-2008) and Head of the Department of Mathematics (2014-2017).

Family Profile:

I am from a small village called Udma (Udayamangalam) in North Malabar region ( Kasaragod District) of Kerala state. I had my school education in Government High School Udma, and college education (Pre-Degree and B.Sc.) at Goverment College Kasaragod, about 15 kilometers from my village. 

I lost my father (Chandu Nair) when I was barely 13 years old and my mother (Meloth Parvathi Amma) passed away in August 2017 at the age of 95. I have four sisters (Padmavathi, Parvathi, Karthiayani, Lakshmi) and a brother (Chandra Sekharan); all of them live in different parts of Kasaragod District.

My wife Sunita, was a Professor of Chemistry at SSN College of Engineering (Kalavakkam) about 35 kilometers from IIT Campus; she resigned her regular position on June 30, 2022 and is associated with the college as Advisor-Students of SSN and SNU Chennai. I have two daughters, Priya and Sneha. After her Ph.D & PDF in Bio-Medical Engineering at Arizona State University USA, Priya is with Medtronic (San Francisco) as Principal R&D Engineer, and Sneha, after completing BE in Bio-Medical Engineering, turned herself into a professional photographer, and now a Cinematographer. 

My interests other than mathematics: Philosophy, Spirituality and Poetry.