Swamy is a child of power Delhi, coming to the city when only six months old, after his mathematician father changed jobs. Sitaram Subramanian rose to become director of the Central Statistical Institute. One of his formidable professional rivals was PC Mahalanobis, statistician and father of the Planning Commission. Swamy turned to mathematics like his father, joining Hindu College — for which he appeared in an alumni debate this past week, crossing swords with old students from St Stephen’s, the college he rejected “because I felt like a foreigner there” — and finishing third in Delhi University. For his master’s, he enrolled at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in Kolkata (then Calcutta), seat of the formidable Mahalanobis himself. “It was here that I first felt prejudice,” he says, “Mahalanobis found out I was my father’s son, and I began to get lower grades than I deserved.” Mahalanobis had written a paper on derivatives for an international journal. As a post-graduate student, Swamy critiqued it and wrote a counter-paper suggesting Mahalanobis was not being original but had borrowed from the work of another mathematician who had done work on the subject a century earlier. The paper was accepted and published in the same journal. It won Swamy no friends at ISI but was noticed by a Harvard professor who offered the young student a fellowship. (Courtesy - Tehelka Magazine | Vol 8, Issue 52 | 31 Dec 2011)
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:44:47 +0000
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