IIT Kanpur appoints computer scientist Manindra Agarwal its new director

NEW DELHI: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kanpur) has appointed Padma Shri and Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award awardee Manindra Agarwal its new director. Agarwal is employed as professor in the computer science and engineering department of IIT Kanpur. His association with IIT Kanpur began in 1996.

Manindra Agrawal completed his BTech and PhD in computer science and engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1986 and 1991, respectively. He then moved to the School of Mathematics, SPIC Science Foundation, Chennai where he worked as a fellow from 1993 to 1995. From 1995 to 1996, he was a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Ulmin Germany.

Agarwal’s research areas include computational complexity theory, computational number theory and algebra. In 2003, he was appointed as the N Rama Rao chair professor. From 2003 to 2004, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.

He has made significant contributions to the theory of efficient reactions between computational problems. He co-created the AKS primality test with Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena, both IIT Kanpur alumni. Agarwal and his co-authors won the 2006 Fulkerson Prize and the 2006 Godel Prize and 2002 Clay Research Award for this work. He has also designed the first efficient and deterministic algorithm for testing if a number is prime.

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The newly-appointed IIT Kanpur director has also designed private-key encryption algorithms for the Navy and Air Force. These algorithms are being used by the armed forces to secure their communications.In September 2008, Aggarwal was awarded the first Infosys Mathematics Prize for outstanding contributions in the broad field of mathematics.