19th convocation of Chennai Mathematical Institute held

At the 19th convocation of the Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), which was held recently, Dr Ajay Sood, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India conferred degrees on eight Ph.D. students, 72 postgraduate students and 57 undergraduate students. Gold medals for academic excellence were awarded to rank holders and meritorious students, including special awards.

Director of CMI, Madhavan Mukund, highlighted the activities of the Institute and reaffirmed the institution’s commitment to excellence in research and teaching.

He pointed out that research output from the core faculty across mathematics, statistics, physics, computer science and data science continues to be very high as measured by the number of citations.

Among other activities of the Institute, the Director highlighted the recently signed MoU with TNeGA (The Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency) in enabling the agency to make strategic data-driven decisions is progressing well.

Madhavan added that CMI recently entered into an international partnership to host thematic research programmes with the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) in Canada.

Commending the Institute on its abiding focus on mathematics and allied areas, Ajay Sood said that this was his first convocation where he was not giving experiential advice to the students, but was encouraged to give a technical talk.

Dr Sood, an acclaimed physicist, formally presented the theory, experiments and simulations on “flocking of active matter” and the potential impact it could have in many real-life situations, including navigation of autonomous vehicles.