In 1977, Professor Aleyamma George, head of statistics at Kerala University, dreamed of establishing a new centre for mathematical sciences in Kerala’s coastal capital Trivandrum. Her mission was to encourage talented young mathematicians to engage in frontline research in the mathematical sciences. But, for many years, it struggled to obtain regular government funding and survived only because of the Herculean efforts and personal funds of both Prof George and its Director since 1985, Professor Arak Mathai.

Later, it supported the operations of eight different dedicated research groups producing award-winning work, and regularly hosts undergraduate-level workshops; it fulfilled the original mission of training and educating new generations of mathematicians, so that they may contribute to cutting-edge, internationally recognised research.

One Woman’s Mathematical Mission

The Centre for Mathematical Science (CMS) in Kerala was officially recognised by the Indian Department of Science and Technology in 2006, when it began to receive regular government funding. Since then, it’s been home to 8 different mathematical research groups, runs undergraduate courses, and has produced award-winning contributions to academia. But the history of the CMS stretches much further back. In 1977, it was registered by Professor Aleyamma George as a non-profit scientific society and research training centre. It began with almost nothing and endured a long, nearly 30-year road to recognition with no consistent state funding.

Prof George had been the head of statistics at the University of Kerala, but envisioned the creation of a centre specifically dedicated to the education and training of young mathematicians and statisticians for academic research. With her own savings and some loans taken out against her pension, she rented office space and purchased the furniture and equipment required for the centre to conduct research. At one point, there were 35 staff members working on a range of practical projects in statistics – such as crop estimation, rainfall monitoring, and other agricultural matters. But throughout this time, funding was scarce, and there was a real possibility that these operations could not be maintained.

The Long Road to Proper Funding

In 1984, new leadership was needed for the CMS after Prof George passed away at the end of the year. The governing body reached out to Arak Mathai, a distinguished professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of McGill in Canada. Prof Mathai was born and raised in Kerala and graduated from the University of Kerala in 1959, as a university topper and a gold medallist at the top of his class. Since leaving for Canada on a Commonwealth scholarship, he’d made a name for himself for his work on distribution theory, special mathematical functions – important functions, usually named after their discoverers, with a wide range of uses. In particular, he’d worked alongside German physicist Hans J. Haubold on reaction rates of nuclear processes going on within the Sun. He was an ideal choice to help further develop the CMS. Later, Hans Haubold collaborated with several scholars at the centre and produced numerous research publications.

Prof Mathai agreed to take on the directorship of the CMS on an initial 5-year period, and devoted nearly 6 months of each year visiting the centre. 40 years later, Prof Mathai remains its director. When he took over, Prof Mathai was unaware of quite how many challenges the centre was facing. Scraps of funding had dried up, researchers were working without pay, and the centre owed money to local businesses for furniture and printing costs. For a time, the work of all project researchers was suspended while Prof Mathai searched for new sources of funding. He struck gold when he was offered new, funded projects by the Indian Department of Science and Technology (DST). This boost earned enough to backpay staff wages and clear the centre’s debts. More good fortune seemed to be around the corner when the State Chief Minister promised that regular maintenance payments would be made available, but the election of a new government nulled the arrangements; the funds never materialised.

Work continued with patchwork funding for many years, until in 2006 the government finally bestowed an official designation. The CMS became a DST institution, enjoying annual state funding as a recognised and respected centre for training and research.

Active Research and Award-Winning Work

In its early days, the centre took on various statistical projects with practical significance in areas such as agriculture, rainfall, and energy extraction from the sea. With Prof Mathai’s arrival, the focus shifted into areas of pure mathematics, as well as statistics. These were Prof Mathai’s own areas of expertise, and included the mathematics of special functions, fractional calculus, and their applications to astrophysics. From 2007 to 2020, 8 different research groups have operated across these fields and produced award-winning, internationally recognised research.

The fractional calculus group was one of the most active at the CMS, producing dozens of published works. Impressively, one paper from 2010 was one of the most downloaded from the Journal of Mathematical Physics that year. The special functions group is also highly productive and responsible for producing two definitive textbooks in the field. Other research groups cover topics in geometrical probability, stochastic processes, and discrete mathematics.

Individual researchers at the CMS have also seen success in national and international awards. Professor Seema Nair won the ‘Best published paper from India’ for her work on Pathway Fractional Integration. In 2010, Professor Dilip Kumar won both the ‘Young Scientist Award in Mathematics’ from the International Academy of Physical Sciences and the ‘Indian Mathematical Society Prize’. He has also won the Young Scientist Award of the Indian Science Congress Association in 2012.

During this period, several notable mathematicians from across with world visited CMS and collaborated with the research scholars. Prominent among them were Anatoly Kilbas from Belarus, Prof Rudolf Gorenflo from Germany, and Francesco Mainardi from Italy. Scholars like Constantino Tsallis and P.N. Rathie from Brazil; Serge Provost, K.N. GowriSankaran, S.P. Singh, and Joseph Tharamangalam from Canada; Allan Pinkus from Israel; Peter Moschopoulos, Bhu Dev Sharma, Thomas Zaslovsky, and J.S. Rao from the USA; as well as Stratis Kounias from Greece visited the centre. Additionally, several leading researchers from various institutions in India visited the centre and collaborated with the scholars.

Teaching Programmes

Prof George’s original foundational vision was the creation of a centre that trained young mathematicians to engage in research. With more resources now at its disposal, the CMS is able to put teaching at the heart of its operations; it regularly hosts workshops and lecture courses to teach motivated students from inside and outside the institution. Between 2007 and 2010, the CMS conducted 18 mini-courses presented by top researchers in the field and composed of research-level lectures. These gave PhD students at the CMS exposure to cutting-edge research in topics such as combinatorics, graph theory, astrophysics, mathematical simulations, and many others.

The CMS had its own printing press capable of producing books to international standards, pamphlets, and brochures, which covered the major areas of research at CMS. Most of the books are reprinted by leading publishers across the world — these include The H-function: Theory and Applications (2010, Springer), Special Functions for Applied Scientists (2008, Springer), An introduction to Fractional Calculus (2017, Nova Publishers), Linear Algebra – A course for Physicists and Engineers (2017, DeGruyter), and Multivariable Statistical Analysis in the Real and Complex Domains (2022, Springer).

Another of its initiatives was to provide training to students at the undergraduate level in the local area. Gifted students from across Kerala were invited to participate in 10-day intensive study programmes, where classes of between 30 and 40 students were given crash courses in core mathematical topics: vectors and matrices, limits, analysis, and probability.

From its financially troubled beginnings, the dedication of its director Prof Mathai, and supportive staff, the CMS became a research and training centre for mathematics in Kerala, realising Prof George’s vision—the CMS was a respected institution with an impressive list of publications to its name that developed its prestige while offering vital education and training programmes to develop the next generation of Indian mathematicians.