Talk Title, Abstract & Bio of Keynote Speakers

Manindra Agrawal
Presentation Schedule: 09.30 - 10.30 AM

Talk Title:Research from First Principles

Abstract: It is often said that, due to tremendous progress made in every domain of science, one needs to spend significant time learning the work done in a domain before one can make nontrivial research contributions. While this is true in general, there is still scope for making contributions based only on first principles of the domain. In this talk, I will give examples from two different domains of mathematics: number theory and pandemic modeling. I will outline how the following two were designed from the first principles:

1) The first efficient and provably correct test for primality of a number, and

2) A mathematical model for Covid-19 pandemic that can adjust itself when ground reality changes using only the daily new infections data

Bio: Manindra Agrawal did his BTech and PhD in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1986 and 1991 respectively. After graduating, he worked at Chennai Mathematical Institute (Chennai) and University of Ulm (Germany) as Humboldt Fellow before joining department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur in 1996. He is currently Professor and Program Director of Technology Innovation Hub in Cybersecurity at IIT Kanpur. His areas of research are complexity theory, computational number theory, cryptography, and mathematical modelling.

He is a recipient of several awards and honours including Gödel Prize, Fulkerson Prize, Humboldt Forscheungpreis, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize, Infosys Prize in Mathematics, and Padma Shri. He is a Foreign Associate of National Academy of Sciences (US), and a Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy (INSA), Indian Academy of Sciences (IASc), National Academy of Sciences India (NASI), and Indian National Academy of Engineers (INAE).

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