Announcement: Atul Dixit (IIT, Gandhinagar) awarded the 2021 Gabor Szego award by OPSF SIAM

Dear all,

We are happy to report that Atul Dixit, one of the co-organizers of this seminar, has been awarded the 2021 Gábor Szegö Prize. This prize is awarded every two years by the SIAM Activity Group on Orthogonal Polynomials and Special Functions (SIAG/OPSF). It is awarded to an early-career researcher for outstanding research contributions within 10 years of obtaining a Ph.D.

 

 

The selection committee for the 2021 award consists of Peter Clarkson (Chair), University of Kent; Kerstin Jordaan, University of South Africa; Adri Olde Daalhuis, The University of Edinburgh; Sarah Post, University of Hawaii; and Yuan Xu, University of Oregon.

 

The selection committee in its letter to him cited his “impressive scientific work solving problems related to number theory using special functions, in particular related to the work of Ramanujan.”

Atul obtained his Ph.D. under the direction of Bruce Berndt in 2012 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Subsequently he did a post-doc at Tulane with Victor Moll as his mentor. Currently, he is in IIT, Gandhinagar and has quickly developed a reputation among young and upcoming mathematicians in this country that has attracted a bright set of Ph.D. students and post-docs to his team. 

We wish Atul continued success, both personally and for the group he is leading. 

Gaurav Bhatnagar and Krishnan Rajkumar (co-organizers with Atul of this seminar). 

Links.

1. Atul's talk in this seminar earlier.
   
2. About the prize. 
3. Atul Dixit's home page
   

Conferences in December (of interest to the group)

Dear all,

The following are the conferences happening all over the country in December (mostly in honor of Ramanujan's birthday). You may forward this email to everyone in our group. 

1. RMS & Rajagiri school of engineering and Technology: (Dec. 11-14, 2020) 

http://www.rajagiritech.ac.in/icntdm/

 

2. 86th Annual conference of the Indian Mathematical Society (Dec. 17-20, 2020)

https://vit.ac.in/IMS/

2. Recent Advances in Mathematics and Related Areas: (Dec. 18-22, 2020)

https://sites.google.com/ksom.res.in/conference2020/home

3. International Conference on Special Functions and Applications (Dec. 22-23, 2020)

http://ssfaindia.org/icsfa2020/

(Deadline for contributed talks: Dec. 15, 2020)

4. International Conference on Number Theory and Algebra (Dec. 22-23, 2020)

https://sites.google.com/view/ramanujan133/home  

(Contributed talks are invited. Deadline for registration: Dec. 18, 2020)

5. 35th Annual Conference of the Ramanujan Mathematical Society  (Dec. 28-30, 2020)

http://35rms2020.com/

 

Best wishes,

 

Atul Dixit

 

 

Cancellations etc.

March 14, 2020 (Pie Day!)

Dear all,

I am sorry to inform you that as per JNU administration requirements, no meetings are allowed. So we have decided to postpone the seminars to April. In case the situation permits in April, I hope we will meet every week and pursue our agenda. 

The agenda, which got clarified since my previous email, is as follows:

a. Circle Method by Manoj Verma

b. Intersection Numbers using Yang-Mills Theory on Riemann Surfaces, by Debashis Ghoshal

c. Mini Course on Continued Fractions 1: Basic Moves by Gaurav Bhatnagar

d. Mini Course on Continued Fractions 2: Convergence Theorems by Krishnan Rajkumar

So please keep your tuesdays free in April (and maybe beyond)

Meanwhile, this is a wonderful opportunity to stay quarantined, not meet anyone, and focus all our efforts on our research for a couple of weeks! I suppose I should have said "I am happy to inform you..."

Best wishes,

Gaurav Bhatnagar and Krishnan Rajkumar

March 11, 2020

Dear all,

We hope you had a safe and happy holi. The last couple of months of the academic year are upon us, and we thought we will do something special before we close for the summer. 

The next talk in our Topics in Special Functions and Combinatorics Seminar is on March 17, 2020. It is by Manoj Verma and it is on Waring's problem and the circle method. The abstract appears below. 

The talk after that is by Debashis Ghoshal on March 31. 

In April, there will be 2-4 talks on the topic of Continued fractions by the two organizers of this seminar. These talks will comprise a mini-course on the subject of continued fractions. We plan to cover the basic moves as well as the convergence theory. Since this topic is not covered in most graduate courses, we hope this will be something unique and useful, especially for those with interests in Combinatorics, Number Theory and Special Functions. We will come back with details soon; please keep your tuesday afternoons free if you are interested, and kindly let interested students know about this. 

In all of the above, the lecturers have promised a focus on techniques and will provide (optional) exercises, so that those of us who are interested can actually get our hands dirty and learn something which we can use in our work. 

Best wishes,

Krishnan Rajkumar  and Gaurav Bhatnagar

TALK ANNOUNCEMENT

Speaker: Manoj Verma (SPS, JNU)

Title: Waring's problem and the circle method

When: Tuesday, March 17, 2020, 4 pm.

Where: Seminar Room, School of Physical Sciences (SPS), Dr. CV Raman Marg, JNU. 

(TO BE CONFIRMED)

Abstract: This talk will be an introduction to the circle method for those with no previous familiarity with the circle method. I shall introduce the method using Waring's problem as the prototype. For a positive integer $k$, let $G(k)$ denote the smallest positive integer $s$ such that every sufficiently large positive integer is a sum of s kth powers of integers. We shall sketch a proof of the fact that $G(k)$ is less than or equal to $2^{k} + 1$.

Students are welcome.

Special Functions and Number Theory: About Us

It was a long, hard, grim winter. I was working a sixty-hour week at Bomber Command. The bomber losses which I was supposed to analyze were growing steadily higher. The end of the war was not in sight. In the evenings of that winter I kept myself sane by wandering in Ramanujan's garden, reading the letters I was receiving from Bailey, working through Bailey's ideas and discovering new Rogers--Ramanujan identities of my own.

This was written by Freeman J. Dyson in his paper celebrating the centenary of Ramanujan's birth. This year, 2020, is the centenary of Ramanujan's passing. So our first talk of the year is on Ramanujan and some of his work. Students are welcome. 

We hope this year our seminar will thrive and build on what we have just begun. In addition, we hope we will get an opportunity to listen to the next generation of budding mathematicians in topics related to special functions and number theory.

We wish you a happy and productive 2020, with many new ideas and papers. 

Gaurav Bhatnagar and Krishnan Rajkumar

2020: New Year Message

UPDATE (4 June 2020): 

This was a new year message we wrote a few months ago, before a talk was held in ISI, Delhi (rather than JNU). But it seems appropriate for the year we are going through. The seminar was stopped for a few months due to a lockdown. Now we are starting again, with an expanded agenda. 

Atul Dixit has joined as a co-organiser and we hope to make this seminar an international group. However, at present, we wish to keep timings as per our our Indian schedule, so as not to lose focus on those whom we wish to benefit the most. However, we will on occasion change timings to suit our international speakers.

The above quote is an appropriate one for many reasons. If you scan through the talks in this seminar, Ramanujan's mathematics plays a large role in almost all of them. This also represents the three organizer's own interests. 

Finally, a word on what we request of speakers. We would like to learn techniques which we can use in our own problems; and sometimes learn about problems which we can solve using our techniques. Many students and people with a variety of  interests come for the talks, so make sure you have something everyone can take home. 

June 4, 2020
Gaurav Bhatnagar, Atul Dixit and Krishnan Rajkumar

Announcing the SF and NT Seminar

We are organizing a seminar on topics in Special Functions and  Number Theory. The meetings will  be held in the School of Physical Sciences, CV Raman Marg in the JNU Campus. At present we plan to meet approximately every other week, on Tuesdays at 3:45 pm.  We would like to discuss problems of mutual interest, and to learn techniques that can be used by us in our own problems. Regular participants are expected to contribute by speaking on their own research, or someone else's research, but of interest to them. 

Graduate students are welcome. In case you are interested in getting notifications of talks, please let Gaurav Bhatnagar or Krishnan Rajkumar  know.  If you know people who may be interested, please feel free to let them know.