Madhav Vithal Nori earned his BSc degree (1969) from Bombay University, MA (1972) University of California, Berkeley, USA and PhD (1981) from Bombay University. His specialization is in Algebraic Geometry.

Academic and Research Achievements: Madhav Nori is an outstanding mathematician with a number of contributions to algebraic geometry and number theory. Among his major achievements is his work on the fundamental groups of Zariski open subsets in a projective surface giving in particular a new proof of a Theorem of Fulton affirming the truth of a conjecture of Zariski. Zariski's question itself was settled by Fulton earlier but as Fulton himself has pointed out, Nori's methods constitute a further deep and profound development. A second result of depth which displays at the same time great elegance and simplicity is Nori's example showing that algebraic equivalence is much finer than homological equivalence for algebraic cycles in projective varieties. He shows this in fact for generic abelian 3-folds. His methods are at once ingenious and elegant. One of Nori's earliest papers deals with certain questions about vector bundles on curves. This piece of work generalises some early work of Weil on the subject. The generalization is very elegant and opened up possibilities for a deeper study of the subject especially in positive characteristics. His work on subgroups of SL(n, Zp) on SL(n, Fp) is very different, and mathematicians working on algebraic groups see in this a striking result. On the other hand Serre has already obtained profound results on Galois actions on divison points of abelian varieties using Nori's ideas and results.

Awards and Honours: Nori was honoured with INSA Medal for Young Scientists (1980) and is an elected Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore.