Monday
23
February 2026
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM IST
Location
Room 300, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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Mathematics and Society
Arts and Sciences Lecture Series
Rajeeva L. Karandikar
Chairman
National Statistical Commission
Government of India
Speaker
For most people, mathematics enters their lives as a set of symbols on a blackboard abstract, demanding, and seemingly distant from everyday experience. It is therefore easy to miss the fact that mathematical ideas have quietly shaped human history for thousands of years, often at moments when societies were trying to solve very practical problems.
This talk traces a story that begins with ancient civilisations looking up at the night sky to predict seasons and improve agriculture, and with sailors learning to navigate vast oceans using numbers and geometry, opening new routes for trade and cultural exchange. As the story moves forward, mathematics emerges at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, guiding engineers as they built bridges, machines, and systems that transformed daily life over the past two centuries. In more recent times, the narrative turns to the invisible mathematics behind secure communication, digital technologies, and the algorithms that now influence how we learn, work, and communicate.
By following this historical journey, the talk aims to reveal mathematics not as an isolated intellectual pursuit, but as a deeply human endeavour—one that continually responds to societal needs and, in turn, reshapes the world we live in, from ancient star charts to modern large language models.
Speaker
Rajeeva L. Karandikar
Rajeeva L. Karandikar is a distinguished mathematician and statistician, currently serving as Chairman of the National Statistical Commission, Government of India, and Professor Emeritus at the Chennai Mathematical Institute. He received his PhD from the Indian Statistical Institute in 1981 and subsequently held academic positions in India, the United States, and Europe. He joined CMI in 2010 and served as its Director from 2011 to 2021, playing a key role in strengthening it as a leading center for mathematical sciences.
Professor Karandikar’s research contributions span stochastic calculus, filtering theory, Markov processes and martingale problems, limit theorems, Monte Carlo methods, queuing theory, game theory, and the theory of option pricing. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences. His honors include the Young Scientist Medal of INSA (1985), the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (1999), the C. R. Rao National Award in Statistics (2000), and the P. C. Mahalanobis Gold Medal (2014).
Beyond academia, he has undertaken extensive statistical consultancy for major government agencies—including the Election Commission of India, FCI, GSEB, CBI, and CBSE—as well as leading corporations such as ICICI Bank, TCS, and Tech Mahindra. He has served on expert committees appointed by the Election Commission and the Supreme Court, providing statistical input on EVM-related matters and online examination fraud. He has also been closely associated with opinion and exit polls in India (1998–2019) and has served as Editor of Sankhya and on the editorial board of the Annals of Probability.
