Kolkata :

Mathematicians all over the world have been trying to solve a 150-year-old problem, popularly called the Holy Grail of maths, and a city mathematician has just been able to give a major insight into it. Ritabrata Munshi has stunned the world and no wonder, he has bagged the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award.

A number theorist, Munshi, who has taken lien from TIFR, Mumbai, to join his alma mater Indian Statistical Institute as faculty, seemed unfazed by all this adulation. In fact, one could sense an urgency in his voice, an urge to carry on with the third degree of the Lindelof hypothesis, which is the route that he is taking along with his co-researchers abroad to finally progress on the line of the ever elusive Reimann hypothesis that was formulated in 1859 by Bernhard Riemann.

It took 60 years to solve the first degree of the L theory and progress on to the second degree that again took 35 years to be resolved. Finally, Munshi has been able to make a global start on the third degree and make a considerable progress.

“The properties of prime numbers, their distribution pattern in the realm of the abstract simply bowled me over and I made up my mind to study maths after plus two despite ranking 25th in the WBJEE and under 400 in IITJEE,” said Munshi. He studied B Stat and M Stat at ISI and then enrolled for Phd at the Princeton University under legendary mathematician Andrew Wiles. He enrolled at Rutgers University, US, for his post doctoral degree.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / Times of India / News Home> City> Kolkata / by Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey, TNN / September 30th, 2015