Dr. Raman Parimala Elected to Honorary Membership of the London Mathematical Society

Published Date: 2023-09-20

The London Mathematical Society has elected Professor Raman Parimala, the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Emory University, to Honorary Membership of the Society.

Professor Parimala was born in Tamil Nadu and received her education in India leading up to her Ph.D. at the University of Mumbai in 1976. Her career has been distinguished by a remarkable series of publications that started with the concrete theory of quadratic forms and evolved into sophisticated constructions of arithmetic geometry. In the process, she proved or refuted a number of conjectures whose difficult nature had confounded the leading arithmeticians and algebraists of a previous generation.

In particular, her construction of non-trivial locally trivial quadratic spaces produced a surprising counterexample to a quadratic analogue of a conjecture of Serre, while her remarkable work with Fluckiger-Bayer on triviality of principal bundles settled positively a conjecture of Serre in the very important case of classical algebraic groups. These and many other chapters in Professor Parimala's opus are illuminated by the conceptual beauty of her techniques as well as the striking results they yield, in as much as her mathematics synthesises deep ideas of arithmetic, algebra, and geometry into a harmonious and powerful whole.

Professor Parimala is a fellow of all three Indian academies of science. She was invited to address the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich in 1994 and was a plenary speaker at the 2010 Congress in Hyderabad. Among her many honours are the Bhatnagar Prize in 1987 and the Srinivasa Ramanujan Birth Centenary Award in 2003. She has been a member of the mathematical sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2019 and on the selection committee for the Abel Prize in 2021-22.

For more information, please visit the London Mathematical Society website.