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 […]
“This is a time of war. The great majority of the people of this country deeply sympathise with risks and sufferings of the people of Great Britain. Many are willing and anxious to take part in the measure needed to help Britain and humanity in this emergency,” said engineer and statesman Sir M Visvesvaraya in […]
The following piece is an edited excerpt from the unpublished autobiography of Robert MW Travers, the son of Morris Travers, IISc’s first Director. Locked in a tussle with JN Tata’s sons over his plans for IISc before he travelled to England on leave in 1910, Morris Travers sensed that having a wife would enable him […]
Back when the plan to set up the Institute was being chalked out, the southern city was hardly the most obvious choice to house it “Bangalore is already the Science Capital, start-up Capital and Technology Capital of the country,” Biocon founder Kiran Majumdar Shaw tweeted recently in support of a demand to make Bangalore India’s […]
