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Mahan Mj (formerly Mahan Mitra) studied at St. Xavier\'s Collegiate School, Calcutta, till Class XII. He then entered the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, where he initially chose to study electrical engineering but later switched to mathematics. He graduated with a Masters in mathematics from IIT Kanpur in 1992. He joined the Ph.D. program in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, with Andrew Casson as his advisor. He received the Earle C. Anthony Fellowship, U.C. Berkeley in 1992–1993 and the Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Fellowship for 1996–1997. After earning a doctorate from U.C. Berkeley in 1997, he worked briefly at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai in 1998. He then joined the Ramakrishna Order of monks in 1998. He was Professor of Mathematics and Dean of Research at the Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University till 2015. He is currently Professor of Mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai and a monk of the Ramakrishna Order at its Mumbai center.
Academic and Research Achievements: Mahan Mj\'s most notable work (Ann. of Math. (2) 179 (2014), no. 1, 1-80; Geom. Funct. Anal. 24 (2014), no. 1, 297-321) resolved a 35 year old conjecture in Kleinian groups stated explicitly by Thurston in his celebrated Bulletin AMS article from 1982. Special cases had been resolved by Cannon and Thurston (in 1985 and published in Geometry and Topology 2007), Minsky (Journal AMS 1992) and McMullen (Inventiones Mathematicae 2001). In Problem 14 of his celebrated Bulletin AMS article (where he outlined 25 questions that guided the development of the field for the next 30+ years, Thurston asked Question: Is the limit set of a surface Kleinian group (Kleinian group abstractly isomorphic to the fundamental group of a 2-manifold) continuously and equivariantly parametrized by the circle? The two papers by Mj mentioned above resolve this problem and describes explicitly the parametrization in terms of an `ending lamination\' -- an invariant associated to an end of a 3-manifold. In subsequent work (Forum of Mathematics, Pi 5 (2017), he extends this to all finitely generated Kleinian groups. In further joint work with Caroline Series, he shows the unexpected result that for a sequence of Kleinian groups converging to a limiting Kleinian group, the sequence of parametrizations does not necessarily converge to the limiting parametrization. Apart from Thurston\'s conjecture, Mj has worked on establishing Pattern Rigidity (a generalization of Mostow Rigidity) and also on fundamental groups of compact Kahler manifolds. In particular, with Biswas, he has classified one relator Kahler groups.
Other Contributions:
Awards and Honours: Mahan Mj is a recipient of the 2011 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Mathematical Sciences and the Infosys Prize 2015 for Mathematical Sciences. He was awarded the J.C. Bose national fellowship in 2014. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (India), Bangalore. He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. |
