When Vijaya Kumar Murthy first received an email from Abhishek Lodha in 2024 to lead the Lodha Mathematical Sciences Institute (LMSI) in Mumbai, he thought it was a fraud. A famous Indian realtor was asking him to shift to India for a math research institute he had never heard of before — it had all the signs of a phishing attack. However, after asking around and confirming with his colleagues in India, he soon realised the offer was indeed real and the possibilities endless.
“I was sure that it was fake. I mean, imagine Bill Gates emails you that he’s setting up a new research institute and wants you to lead it – it felt too good to be true,” said Murthy, an eminent number theorist and former director of the Fields Institute for Research and Mathematical Sciences in Toronto.
What the leading realtor was proposing, Murthy knew, could shift the paradigm of India’s math research landscape entirely. The country had never had a dearth of math education institutions, or the scholars, but this would be the first time it would have a place dedicated purely to research and collaboration between mathematicians, without the distraction of running educational programmes.
“We have envisioned the institute to be research in its purest form – math without boundaries, without administrative constraints,” said Murthy with a smile, at the end of the two-day LMSI inaugural symposium in Mumbai recently.
Despite being conceived just one year ago by the Lodha Foundation, the newly founded institute is already making waves in academic circles. Stalwarts such as Murthy and Manjul Bhargava – the first Indian-origin Fields’ Medalist – are on the board, and 40 other mathematicians from India and abroad were present at the symposium, braving Mumbai’s rains. In a country that boasts of Aryabhatta and the invention of zero, Bhaskara II, the earliest quadratic equations, and Ramanujan’s number theory, a place like LMSI seems to fit right in.
“Mathematics is at the root of all innovation happening across the world, and a lot of this work is done by Indians globally, but hardly any within India,” Abhishek Lodha, the CEO of the Lodha Group, told ThePrint. “We wanted to see what it would look like to bring the benefit of this innovation and thinking back to India.”
The two-day inaugural symposium at Mumbai’s Lodha World Towers showed Abhishek exactly that; the days were filled with conferences and talks on everything from convex geometry to AI and data poisoning attacks, to even applications of math in quantum field theory.
Each day, 40 mathematicians would turn up without fail to engage and participate in true Socratic fashion in their peers’ discussions and end the day with more questions than answers. Ballroom 6 of the Lodha World Towers thus played host to the first of what LMSI hopes would be many other conferences to come.
“We wanted to bring this innovation and talent back to our country. It’s a small step by us, that would hopefully be a giant leap for India.”
The conspicuous absence of the Fields Medal in Mathematics – often referred to as the Mathematics Nobel – from India’s oeuvre was widely noticed. While Manjul Bhargava and Akshay Venkatesh did win it in 2014 and 2018, neither are Indian citizens. Bhargava was born and raised in Toronto, and Venkatesh moved to Australia when he was 2
Also read: Sleepless in western UP. Everybody is panicking about drones
Math research in India
The inaugural symposium of LMSI was replete with references to India’s treasured mathematics history, from Aryabhatta to Bhaskara to Ramanujan, by academics and other speakers alike. The participation of academics such as Mahan Mj of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and even S Ramanan of Chennai Mathematical Institute reinforced the presence of strong math-focused institutions in India. The extent of their impact shone through during the presentations – more than two presenters referred to Ramanan’s groundbreaking work on vector bundles with MS Narasimhan, another legend of the post-Independence Indian math ecosystem.
India has immense potential and opportunity for mathematics research, with a large pool of talented youth—that was the sentiment among scholars gathered.
However, the conspicuous absence of the Fields Medal in Mathematics – often referred to as the Mathematics Nobel – from India’s oeuvre was widely noticed. While Manjul Bhargava and Akshay Venkatesh did win it in 2014 and 2018, neither are Indian citizens. Bhargava was born and raised in Toronto, and Venkatesh moved to Australia when he was 2.
One of the reasons for this, according to Lodha and the other attendees at the symposium, could be traced to the absence of a dedicated research institute in the country. Some of the attendees postulated that a larger focus on building institutes for technology, specificially engineering, veered India’s youth away from pure mathematics research. Another reason is that unlike in other STEM subjects, the real-world impacts of math breakthroughs are not seen immediately. Work done by Ramanujan in the early 1900s on singularities is still being uncovered and understood by mathematicians today to solve problems.
“We have many fantastic math institutes around the world that have made great breakthroughs – the IAS in Princeton, Max Planck in Germany, but never in India. Even in recent years, China has developed one and Korea has developed one, but India hasn’t had one,” said Bhargava, who is on the advisory panel at LMSI.
Giving examples, he spoke about how mathematical talent in India has always felt that to cultivate their talent, they have to go abroad. But LMSI would finally change that.
Places like the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton (1930), home to the likes of Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and John von Neumann, offer a space for academics to further their intellectual pursuits in their specific fields. Without classes, professors, or even tuition fees, it was a space created for unburdened research. Other institutes, such as Fields in Toronto, Max Planck in Germany, and Santa Fe in New Mexico followed a similar template.
“It is … one of the few institutions in the world where the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is the ultimate raison d’être. Speculative research, the kind that is fundamental to the advancement of human understanding of the world … benefits from a special environment,” reads the IAS handbook.
Places like the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton (1930), home to the likes of Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and John von Neumann, offer a space for academics to further their intellectual pursuits in their specific fields. Without classes, professors, or even tuition fees, it was a space created for unburdened research.
The LMSI aims to create this exact atmosphere and fill the void in the Indian academic ecosystem for pure mathematical research institutes.
“The Fields Medal is, of course, just one measure (of success), but there are a lot of excellent Indian-origin mathematicians doing brilliant work in the world,” said Murthy. “If you start bringing those people together, provide an opportunity and venue for them to come together and collaborate, I think you will find a stimulating effect throughout the country,” he added.
Also read: What sets Premanand Maharaj apart—‘doesn’t sell miracles’, a celebrity favourite
What is LMSI?
Funded by a generous grant from the Lodha Foundation, the LMSI is headed by VK Murthy as its Director. The illustrious scientific advisory panel consists of Manjul Bhargava of Princeton, Saurav Chatterjee and Ravi Vakil of Stanford, Alexander Lubotzky of Weizmann Institute of Science, and Kavita Ramanan of Brown University.
“Last year, the Lodha family donated Rs. 20,000 crore to the Lodha Foundation, as a consequence of which the Foundation is scaling up its activities in many areas, including in setting up the LMSI,” said Abhishek Lodha.
Housed on the 16th floor of the Lodha Supremus building in New Cuffe Parade, Mumbai, the LMSI began its operations barely a day after the inaugural ceremony ended. Since there are no classes or graduate degrees, the structure of the Institute is centred around six-month-long schematic programmes where scholars and researchers gather to discuss, ideate, and work on one topic.
The first schematic programme, which will run from August to December this year, is being hosted by Bhargava on arithmetic statistics – a branch of the broader subject number theory, which is Bhargava’s speciality, something that earned him both the Fields Medal and the Morgan Prize in the US when he was just an undergraduate. The programme will feature talks and presentations by approximately 20-30 academics from around the world.
“This is the first time I’ll actually be participating in an institute like this, and I’m really excited to see what unfolds,” said Sameera Vemulapalli, a post-doc at Harvard University who travelled to Mumbai for the programme. She completed her PhD under Bhargava at Princeton. “I’ll be meeting so many people I would have never been able to otherwise.”
For early-career academics like Vemulapalli and Tim Santens, another post-doc from the University of Cambridge, the Institute offers the perfect opportunity to present their research to a group of renowned academics. Both are researchers of algebraic geometry and use number theory in different forms in their work.
After Bhargava, Professor Raman Parimala of Emory University, another famous mathematician who specializes in algebra, will conduct the next schematic programme from December to August 2026. Professor Mahan Mj of TIFR is scheduled to take the third schematic programme, which will end in December 2026, in time for the first Indian Congress of Mathematicians that Murthy plans to host at LMSI.
“I truly believe that the beneficiaries of this institute are not just going to be a handful of mathematicians but the entire country – we’re planting seeds here for innovation of the future,” said Murthy.
Also read: A handwritten note, 2 signatures, only dead ends in Kashmir—Sarla Bhat murder is no easy case
Lodhas on a ‘knowledge revolution’ mission
For Lodha, who has invested a little less than Rs 100 crore in the institute, its success is marked on two parameters — academic and societal. He wants LMSI to raise the standards of mathematical research in India. Not just through regular publications and attracting top faculty. But also ensuring a larger change is visible in the national fabric.
“If, because of the institute, we see a larger number of Indian students in school and college see math as a subject they want to pursue professionally, then I’ll say it’s a success,” he told ThePrint in an interview.
While it’s still nascent, Lodha also wants LMSI to delve deeper into applied mathematics, and not just theory. Problems of traffic modelling, cryptography, cybersecurity, and, of course, artificial intelligence all need foundational math to function. If the institute can help secure that foundation in India, it would contribute to changing the national ‘fabric’ of the country.
“We see ourselves as the fulcrum of reigniting the knowledge revolution in India, and for this, we’re quite collaborative,” said Lodha.
Bhargava and the others seem fully on board with the mission, too.
While it’s still nascent, Lodha also wants LMSI to delve deeper into applied mathematics, and not just theory. Problems of traffic modelling, cryptography, cybersecurity, and, of course, artificial intelligence all need foundational math to function
“See, in math, unlike other STEM subjects, we don’t need too many labs or fancy lab equipment for our research. We just need a chalkboard and some space to think,” quipped one of the attendees at the symposium, who wished to remain anonymous.
According to Vikraman Balaji, a professor of Chennai Mathematical Institute, deep math requires two main things: a space to contemplate and a space to collaborate.
Most mathematicians, be it German logician Kurt Godel or English number theorist Andrew Wiles or even game theorist John Nash, must have spent “hours and hours” just thinking in isolation about their work and coming up with their ideas, he mused.
“But once an idea comes to you, you also need a place where you can interact with other highly competent mathematicians and work through your ideas together,” said Balaji. “Collaboration and contemplation go hand-in-hand, and that’s what LMSI promises to support,” he added.
Towards the end of the conference, Murthy was speaking to a young scholar from Chennai Mathematical Institute, who had just finished her PhD in algebraic geometry. While encouraging her to apply for one of the semantic programmes at LMSI, Murthy remarked that she must be the youngest mathematician in the room that day.
“Who knows? You might just be our first Fields medalist! After all, it is for people like you that we have built this institute – you are the future of math in this country.”
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)