My father, Santanam, was a very intelligent man. He was not keen on reading but he was very practical. ... When something went wrong, say with the electricity at home, he could fix it. He had that kind of ability. But not very intellectually inclined. He respected learning though, without question. The family on the paternal side were not as excited about learning and knowledge, as the people on my maternal side.

I had good teachers. And one teacher whom I remember is a man by the name of Charyulu who taught us physics. He would come up with questions in the class which were quite intriguing and quite unusual. It gave me great pleasure because I happened to be one of the people who would answer it early on, especially if it was mathematics. He used to give us problems both in mathematics and physics, every science subject in fact. In mathematics, I was practically always the first one to come up with the solution, which pleased me immensely.

The interview didn't go very well as I saw it at that time. Singbal asked me some questions one after another and I kept on giving the wrong answers, but successively kept correcting them when he asked if I was sure if that was right. It was a step by step correction, and obviously what they were looking for was to see whether I could think and if I was able to correct a wrong statement I made. I didn't realise that, and so I thought my interview was a washout.

We used to stay in a hostel near the Gateway of India. It was in fact the servant's quarters of old Yacht Club which had been converted into a student's hostel. It was a terrible place - for instance, there were bed bugs, rats running around and water was a perennial problem. I was constantly in the company of two others. I used to go fairly early, around 9 o'clock, to the Institute, which is located in Colaba. The other two would turn up somewhat later. We used to spend the whole day in the Institute - eat lunch there, and sometimes dinner also, but at one point of time we used to come back for dinner in a mess near the hostel. We would eat dinner and then go back to the Institute and work there till about 1.00 or 1.30 at night, sometimes even later. Then we would go back to the hostel, stopping on the way at the Central Telegraph Office. That was one place where you could get tea at that hour. My friends Pavaman Murthy and C P Ramanujam would work on even after that.

When I came to the Tata Institute, my background was very poor in most things. At the Tata Institute, they were not interested in any applied mathematics. The only things we were taught were pure mathematics subjects, like courses on algebra, analysis, topology, and complex analysis in the first year. I didn't know what a group, a ring or a module was when I joined the Tata Institute. In that year, two of us were selected but the other candidate didn't join. So I was the only one, and the faculty decided that they could not have courses for just one student. I was kind of told what to read, which I didn't find difficult to do. For one thing, all my senior students were very helpful. Whenever I had doubts, I could go and have my doubts cleared with them, and I also found the recommended books quite readable, and interesting. And I made good progress.

It was one of the most beautiful sets of lectures I have ever heard from anybody ...

When he found out that she knew our family, he told her that I was a very good student. Outstanding! "If he leaves mathematics, it will be a loss for mathematics." This lady promptly conveyed it to my family, and the family no longer looked at the idea of me joining the business. They said "you stay with mathematics".

The author develops a theory of deformations of linear connections and Riemannian metrics on a differentiable manifold which is analogous to the theory for complex structures [K Kodaira and D C Spencer (1958)]. The results are most definitive for a deformation of regular connections or metrics. A linear connection or Riemannian metric is said to be regular if the vector space of germs of Killing vector fields has a constant dimension. A locally homogeneous or analytic connection (or metric) is regular.

... suggested that I work a little bit more on that, and also suggested that there may be some connection with discrete subgroups of Lie groups. He also referred to a paper by André Weil, and said, "maybe the two are connected. You should explore that possibility." So, I did look at it and I found that indeed there was a connection. So that also went into the thesis. In fact, this actually moved me away from differential geometry, to Lie groups, and to discrete subgroups of Lie groups, which has been my sole preoccupation, more or less, for the last 60 years.

I never spoke a single word to him during my entire stay. He would come there, to a lounge sometime in the afternoon, sit in a corner, read The Wall Street Journal and go back. I was too scared to approach him. He was a big man. He was a Fields Medalist.

We construct a fundamental domain Ω for an arbitrary lattice Γ in a real rank one, real simple Lie group, where Q has finitely many cusps (i.e., is a finite union of Siegel sets) and has the Siegel property. From the existence of a we derive a number of consequences. In particular, we show that Γ is finitely presentable and is almost always rigid.

A few years ago we had many stimulating conversations with Professor Selberg, and in these conversations he was kind enough to show us his early results on the existence of unipotent elements in nonuniform lattices. It gives us great pleasure to extend to him our hearty thanks.

She has a masters degree in mathematics but her strength is in literature and languages. Her greater interest is in English literature and she also has a feel for languages. She can speak many languages. She taught mathematics in Cathedral School, Bombay. She also taught French. When her French students were also among her mathematics ones, she amused them by telling them about Bourbaki, and once giving a passage on Stoke's formula from André Weil's autobiography for dictation in French.

Discrete subgroups of Lie groups have been the central objects of his researches. The Lie groups, named after Sophus Lie who introduced them in 1873, have had a tremendous impact in various areas of mathematics and physics. By the middle of the 20th century the structure of Lie groups had been well-understood and the focus had shifted to the study of their discrete subgroups, as it was realised that this would be of great significance in geometry and number theory. One of the major problems was to describe all discrete subgroups suitably. The so-called rigidity and arithmeticity problems were the focus of the study. Raghunathan made major contributions towards that end. Starting from the mid-1970s the "congruence subgroups problem" has been his major preoccupation. The problem concerns the inter-relation between two classes of discrete subgroups which are crucial from the point of view of number theory. Through his work, Raghunathan is undoubtedly a leader in this central mathematical topic. Raghunathan has also made significant contributions on geometric questions.

This is a textbook meant to be used at the advanced undergraduate or graduate level. It is an introduction to the theory of Lie groups and Lie algebras. The book treats real and p-adic groups in a unified manner.

Chapters 4 and 5 are on Lie groups. All the standard results on Lie groups are proved here. Some of the proofs are different from those in the earlier literature. The last two chapters are on Lie algebras and cover their structure theory as found in the first of the Bourbaki volumes on the subject. Some proofs here are new.

... in the development of higher mathematics in India, to formulate policies for the development of mathematics, help in the establishment and development of mathematical centres and give financial assistance to research projects and to doctoral and postdoctoral scholars.