Latest Event_SPL Lecture by Dr. Ashoke Sen

June 29, 2015

Dear all,

I am happy to see an overwhelming response from my M Sc, Mphil students and research scholars to attend the SPL day lecture by Ashoke Sen on 29.06.2015. A total of 42 persons including myself was lucky enough to attend the talk of such a distinguished person in international community. Let me share a little about his credentials.

ASHOKE SEN, FRS is an Indian theoretical physicist and distinguished professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad. He also is the Morningstar Visiting professor at MIT and a distinguished professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study. His main area of work is String Theory. He was among the first recipients of the Fundamental Physics Prize “for opening the path to the realisation that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory”. This prize has been set up by the Russian billionaireYuri Milner for rewarding scientific breakthroughs.

Early life

He was born on 15 July 1956 in Kolkata, and is the elder son of Anil Kumar Sen, a former professor of physics at the Scottish Church College, and Gouri Sen, a homemaker. After completing his schooling from the Sailendra Sircar Vidyalaya and the Scottish Church Collegiate School in Kolkata, he earned his bachelors of science degree in 1975 from the Presidency College under the University of Calcutta, and his master’s three years later from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. During his undergraduate studies at Presidency, he was greatly inspired by the work and teaching of Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri. He did his doctoral work in physics at Stony Brook University.

Career

Ashoke Sen made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality, which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensation on such branes. His description of rolling tachyons[6] has been influential in string cosmology. He has also co-authored many important papers on string field theory. In 1998 he won the fellowship of the Royal Society on being nominated by the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors. His current research interests are centered around the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates of black holes. Recently he has joined National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER) as an honorary fellow.

Honors and awards

· Dirac Medal in 2014

· Doctor of Literature (honorary), 2013, awarded by Jadavpur University.

· Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa), 2013, awarded by IIT Bombay

· M.P. Birla Memorial Award in 2013

· Padma Bhushan in 2013

· Fundamental Physics Prize, 2012, for his work on string theory

· Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa), 2009, awarded by IIT Kharagpur

· Infosys Prize in the Mathematical Sciences, 2009

· Padma Shri in 2001

· Fellow of the Royal Society 1998

· Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 1996

· S.S. Bhatnagar award in 1994

· ICTP Prize in 1989

Attaching some photos of the same.

I congratulate Athira, II M Sc student for interacting with the speaker. It is definitely her first step to excellence. It was great pleasure in taking all my students to this venue and our togetherness is quite remarkable to watch. Thank you all for you cooperation.

Let me also post some photos which were taken with S2 and S4 students during their start of semester.