Professor Ravi Rao delivered a lecture on 'Muse of Mathematics'. He talked about the brief prelude to his (mis)-adventures into a life of mathematics. The talk leads to some trends and future directions in research areas related to his work.

About the speaker:
The main focus of Ravi Rao's work has been the study of non-stable properties of projective modules and their automorphisms keeping in mind the relationship of this study to the subject of efficient generation of ideas. He established theory for the cancellation of projective modules which are free on a two cover. He used this theory to settle a decade-old question of Hyman Bass. He is a leading expert on the use of Quillen's Local Global principle to several questions in Classical Algebraic K-theory. Ravi Rao has finished work with 10 students for their doctoral program. At present, he is working with 6 more students towards their doctoral thesis. He has 38 published papers, around 8 more in preparation, written one Springer Monograph on Set-theoretic complete intersections with F. Ishcebeck, and edited one book on computational commutative algebra and algebraic geometry (which he has espoused). He has run more than 10 workshops, conferences in K-theory, computational commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, set-theoretic complete intersections, invariant theory and algebraic geometry, etc. He was an Editor of the Bulletin of the Bombay Mathematical Colloquium for seven years from 1995-2002. He was responsible, along with J. K. Verma and Ananth Shastri, to conceive and present the idea of running the AFS Schools to Ravi Kulkarni, and then to defend it with N.B.H.M. for its support. He served in the initial organizing committee of the AFS Schools for five years. He was Member, Board of Studies, Mumbai University for three years. He was a Member for the last ten years and is present, Chairman, Publications, School of Mathematics, T.I.F.R. He made widely available soft copy downloads of the prestigious T.I.F.R. Lecture note series, and worked for the digital preservation and publishing of the Collector's edition of the Notebooks of Ramanujan.