14^th December 2021 – While the world tries to pin down India on gender disparity and discrimination, Indian women quietly are taking the world stage in different walks of life. On one hand, Harnaz Sandhu became the 12^th woman from India to have won an international beauty pageant. On the other hand, Professor Neena Gupta, who is a mathematician at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, has been awarded the 2021 DST-ICTP-IMU Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians from developing nations for extra-ordinary work in affine algebraic geometry and commutative algebra.

She is the 4^th Indian ever to have received the prestigious award. Professor Gupta is the third woman to receive the Ramanujan Prize, which was first awarded in 2005 and is administered by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) jointly with the Department of Science and Technology (DST) Government of India and the International Mathematical Union (IMU).

Ramanujan Prize is given annually to an eminent Mathematician who is less than 45 years of age on 31 December of the year of the award and has conducted outstanding research in developing countries by ICTP, Trieste and is sponsored by the DST, Government of India.

The DST-ICTP-IMU Ramanujan Prize committee, composed of eminent mathematicians from around the world, commented that Gupta’s work “shows impressive algebraic skill and inventiveness”. Professor Gupta’s solution for solving the Zariski cancellation problem, a fundamental problem in Algebraic Geometry, earned her the 2014 Young Scientists Award of the Indian National Science Academy, who described her solution as ‘one of the best works in algebraic geometry in recent years done anywhere’.