Violet Bajaj, a contemporary of Anna Mani and Rajeswari Chatterjee, talks about her years at the Institute and beyond Violet Bajaj is 101 years old. She sits in her room before dinner, with the Gerald Seymour thriller she is currently reading on the table before her. Reading is her favourite hobby, and a low cupboard […]
A telecommunications entrepreneur on the lure of industry I joined the Department of Electrical Communication as a research student in January 1965 after completing my MSc degree in Mathematics from Mysore University. During my PhD, I worked on a problem that drew heavily from a subject I loved, mathematics. Like many, I did not know what to expect when I joined the Institute. But […]
I was born on 24 January 1922, in Bangalore (when the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) was 13 years old) in a house called “Casetta” on Sankara Mutt Road in the southern part of Bangalore. Probably in 1934 or so, the children of our school, Mahila Seva Samaja, were taken in a bus to IISc […]
The mathematician and first woman to be dean at IISc on wearing many hats I was exhausted after facing an interview for the PhD programme at IISc’s Applied Mathematics Department [now called the Department of Mathematics], that lasted for more than three hours. Having lost hope, my father was ready to take me back home […]
The mathematician and former dean on her growth at IISc Put it in any way you like – (a) from the beginning to the end, or (b) from the start to finish or (c) from alpha to omega – of my active research life was spent at the Indian Institute of Science. I entered as […]
A computational linguist-turned-information theorist talks about the nature of research I was a Sanskrit Lecturer at Maharani’s College and BES College of Arts, Science and Commerce, while also carrying out research in language processing systems and information processing. This research was carried out in Maharani’s College in collaboration with Bangalore University. One day, I read […]
Dead rats forced the Institute to suspend classes in 1937 The first plague pandemic, the Plague of Justinian, ravaged the Eastern Roman Empire killing between 25 and 50 million people in the sixth century. The second, the infamous Black Death, obliterated between 100 and 200 million people in Eurasia in the 1300s. And the third, […]
What old brochures of the event tell us about its purpose, and about how IISc saw itself The Indian Science Congress (ISC), an annual gathering of scientists, was begun in 1914 by two British chemists, JL Simonsen and PS MacMahon, who wanted to model it on the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In […]
CV Raman was the Director of IISc from 1933 to 1937. It was in this period, in November 1935, that Kenneth Aston arrived as the professor and head of the Department of Electrical Technology. Uma Parameswaran, in her biography of Raman, writes that Aston was not Raman’s choice for the post and became “one of […]
It was in 1946 that Dhawan arrived at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT, now Graduate Aerospace Laboratories), wanting to work with Hans Liepmann. But the Indian students Liepmann had worked with until then had given him the impression that “perhaps the select group that came to Caltech from India […]
