Women and math do go hand-in-hand, and Neena Gupta, a mathematician with multiple awards in her kitty, is a fine example of that
Neena Gupta, Professor, Theoretical Statistics and Mathematics, ISI
Image: Debarshi Sarkar for Forbes India
The subject most children fear is the one that Neena Gupta loved. “My mother never counted practising math in my study time,” says the 38-year-old professor at the Theoretical Statistics and Mathematics unit in Kolkata’s Indian Statistical Institute (ISI). “She thought it was my hobby.”
But that the hobby would culminate into bagging awards for exemplary research in the subject is something no one in the family, including Gupta, had ever thought of.
In 2014, she was awarded the Young Scientists Award by the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) for solving the Zariski Cancellation Problem, posed by Oscar Zariski, one of the most eminent founders of modern algebraic geometry.
“One of the best works in algebraic geometry in recent years done anywhere,” was INSA’s remark on Gupta’s solution. In 2021, she was awarded the Ramanujan Prize for young mathematicians for her series of outstanding work in affine algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, particularly for the Zariski Cancellation Problem, that had remained unsolved for 60 years until 2014 when Gupta cracked it.
(This story appears in the 16 December, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)