RAMAN PARIMALA - A RENOWNED MATHEMATICIAN

“Math has the beauty of poetry,” says the math wizard who once briefly
contemplated taking up Sanskrit poetry. In this long line of eminent
math wizards in India, proudly stands Parimala Raman, a mathematician
known globally for her contribution in the field of algebra.

Childhood

Parimala was born on 21 November 1948, Mayiladuthurai,

Nagapattinam district and grown up in Tamil Nadu, India. She studied at
Sarada Vidyalaya Girls’ High School and Stella Maris College, both in
Chennai. She said that she was very fortunate to have excellent teachers,
both in school and in college, who nurtured her interest in mathematics.
During her time at Stella Maris College there was a brief period where
she contemplated taking up Sanskrit poetry but numbers had truly taken
over her heart.
She also shares that during her college days Professor Thangamani was
of great help of her, and influenced her career choice. To our surprise
there were no mathematicians in her family. Her father was a professor
of English and her mother is a housewife.

Education

She grew up in the environment where academic performance was the

highest priority. She proudly says that her father instilled discipline to
work towards excellence in whatever she took up.
When she graduated from high school, her father sat her down and asked
her what she wanted to do. “I said, ‘I want to continue with math
period,’ Parimala recalls, adding that it was an unusual path for a female.

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“My father knew I had an aptitude for math and was very supportive of
my higher studies.”
When the time comes to choose her career, her father suggested
medicine or English literature since a career in medicine or in teaching is
most suited for girls. Then she quickly realizes that her interest was in
mathematics. That day she was promised by her father to send her to the
best possible institution for higher studies.
Parimala received her B.Sc. in 1968 and M.Sc.1970 from University of
madras and decided to take up teaching job at Stella Maris College-a
standard career path for many of her seniors, who were her role models.
But Professor Thangamani specifically instructed the college
management not to employ her as lecturer since she felt that she was cut
out for a research career.
Parimala credits her parents with supporting her and letting her find her
own space. She said that she had such enlightened parents who
encouraged her to do whatever she excelled in to the best possible
manner. Her father guided her through her choice of a research
institution, while her mother was the rock of support during her entire
career. With the solid backing of her family, Parimala took up the
research work at the Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Studies in
Mathematics.
She said that Professors like Bhanumurthy and Rama taught her
mathematics with great enthusiasm. Later after a year, she moved to
Tata institute to work with Professor R.Sridharan for her Ph.D. degree.
She received her Ph.D. in 1976 from University of Bombay, specializing
in algebra. Her thesis title was ‘Projective modules over polynomial rings
over division rings’.

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At the time, when she completed writing up her thesis, she says that she
was diffident about continuing as a research mathematician. The
presence of some of the greatest mathematicians of the world at the
Institute as well as some brilliant youngsters emerging as shooting stars
on the horizon was truly daunting.
For her doctorate, Parimala attended the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research in Mumbai, one of the top institutes in India for the basic
sciences. She is a fellow of all three Indian academies of science.

Career

For many years she was a professor of Tata institute of fundamental

research Mumbai (Bombay). She was hired on the faculty after
graduating, but then she got married and moved to Tanzania, where her
husband worked as an auditor.
Tata Institute is one of the very few institutes in the world, dedicated to
research work. She feels very privileged and responsibility to work at
such a place. The institution provided her great environment for research
with total academic freedom, an excellent library and a vibrant visitors
program.
Mathematics to all over the world exposed the latest developments
through lecture series. She says, “I gained a THE IMMENSE BEAUTY
OF MATHEMATICS lot through interaction with visiting
mathematicians.”

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Professor R. Sridharan instilled the responsibility of dissemination of
knowledge to youngsters in her. She had the privilege to interact with
students – working with each one of them led to the fascinating exposure
to new areas. She feels proud to say that some of her students have
outperformed her.
Professor Parimala got married to Raman, who was chief internal auditor
with the board of internal trade, Tanzania. She credits her husband,
Raman for his immense support. She then took leave for a year after her
wedding. Today a supreme and powerful algebraist is with us because of
extraordinary and critical decision of Raman. At that time she found
herself in a dilemma until he quit his job to accompany her to E.T.H.
Zurich and move with her to Switzerland so she could do post-doctoral
work. This critical decision enabled her to get back to mathematics.
“But for his support, I would have given up my career at some point.
More than support, his enthusiasm for the research I do and rejoicing
when I get recognition were steering forces for me to continue to this
date in the profession. He is immensely proud of me,” says Parimala.
In Switzerland, she met her colleagues like M. Ojanguren and M.A.
Knus with whom she have had fruitful mathematical interactions
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throughout her career. She was an invited speaker at the International
Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich in 1994 and gave a talk Study of
quadratic forms — some connections with geometry and she has held
visiting positions at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in
Zürich, the University of Lausanne, University of California-Berkeley,
University of Chicago, Ohio State, and the University of Paris at Orsay.
After Switzerland, the couple returned to Mumbai, where Parimala
resumed teaching at the Tata Institute, until she joined Emory in 2005.
She had met members of the Emory math faculty at conferences, and
knew that she would fit in well with the department.
The other primary motivation was to be closer to her only child, Sri
(Sridhar), has a keen interest in mathematics, and keeps abreast of what
she was doing, although he chose for himself a career in technology,
who now works as a quantitative research analyst in New York.
In 2005 Parimala was appointed the Asa Griggs Candler professor of
Mathematics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Prof. Parimala is
a well-known name in the field of algebra. She has been credited for
achieving many firsts in the field, including publishing the first example
of a nontrivial quadratic space over an affine plane at a young age - an
achievement that is said to have surprised even the experts in the field.
She is also credited for several elegant publications often supporting
or overturning long standing conjectures in algebra. She primarily works
in algebra, using her knowledge in other fields like number theory,
topology and algebraic geometry.

Research work

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Following the affirmative solution in 1976 by Quillen-Suslin of Serre's
conjecture on projective modules over polynomial rings, Parimala
constructed remarkable counter examples to a quadratic analogue of
Serre's conjecture.
This worked to a whole lot of results relating to principal bundles under
linear algebraic groups over affine spaces. Her work on the Unramified
Cohomology of real algebraic varieties placed in higher dimensional
setting a theorem of Witt on separation of connected components of real
algebraic curves by the Brauer group.
Her solution, jointly with Eva Bayer-Fluckiger, of Serre's conjecture on
triviality of principal homogeneous spaces under semisimple simply
connected linear algebraic groups over fields of cohomological
dimension 2 and real analogues of this conjecture are significant in the
context of study of linear algebraic groups and homogeneous spaces in
more general contexts than global fields. She is also well-recognised for
her solution to the second Serre conjecture.
In the 1950s, it was predicted that the u-invariant of the rational function
field over a p-adic field is finite and, in fact, equals 8. Until recently,
even the finiteness of the u-invariant was not known, until demonstrated
by Merkurjev. Van Geel-Hoffmann then calculated a value of around 22
for the u-invariant.
In a recent work with Suresh, Parimala has shown that the u-invariant of
the function field of any curve over a p-adic field is less than or equal to
10, very close to the conjectured value of 8 and every quadratic form in
at least nine variables over function fields of nondyadic p-adic curves
has a nontrivial zero.

Awards and honours

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Her research has been recognized with the Bhatnagar Prize in 1987, an
honorary doctorate from the University of Lausanne in 1999, and The
Srinivasa Ramanujan Birth Centenary Award in 2003.
Parimala received the 2005 prize in mathematics from the Academy of
Sciences for the Developing World for her work on the quadratic
analogue of Serre's conjecture, the triviality of principal homogeneous
spaces of classical groups over fields of cohomological dimensions 2
and the μ-invariant of p-adic function fields.
Prizes in the amount of $10,000 are awarded annually to scientists from
developing countries who have made an outstanding contributions to the
advancement of science. This was the first time in the 20-year history of
the TWAS awards that a woman had been honored with the prize in
either mathematics or physics.
In 2010, Parimala received one of the
highest global honour in her field when
she selected as the plenary speaker at
the International Congress of
Mathematicians (ICM).She addressed
about the topic Arithmetic of linear
algebraic groups over two dimensional
fields.
She is a Fellow, Indian Academy of
Sciences, Bangalore and the National
Academy of Sciences (India),
Allahabad and a Fellow of the
American Mathematical Society
(2012). She also looks forward to new
research challenges, primarily in

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algebraic groups, and quadratic forms. She feels that there are many
interesting question that kept her wondering.
Parimala was recently invited to speak at Nehru University in Delhi,
during a conference aimed at inspiring more female students to focus on
math. She said that most bright students in India choose another career
over basic sciences.
She says “It’s a global phenomenon, actually, because they think there
are more attractive jobs in other areas. But math offers a challenging and
rewarding profession. If you have a love and a talent for it, you should
come to math. That is my plea.”
On NATIONAL SCIENCE DAY in 2020, Smriti Irani, Minister,
Women and Child Development, Government of India, announced
establishment of chair in name of Raman Parimala along with ten great
Indian Women Scientists at Institutes across India, who have contributed
to the field of science. It is also to inspire women and encourage
participation of young girls in STEM (Science Technology Engineering
and Mathematics).
She says, “It is a world of ‘make believe’, with great excitement from
time to time. I only wish I had the lucidity of my father to convey to the
outside world the immense beauty of mathematics!”