Friday, February 02, 2007

Prof J C Misra

In the recently formulated Indian Science Congress at Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu, Prof JC Misra, an eminent scientist from IIT Kharagpur, was elected the president of the Mathematical Science (including statistics) section.
Prof Misra is the only mathematician from IIT to have been elected to adorn this prestigious designation in its history dating back to the nineteen fifties, Science Congress sources said. He is well-known in India and abroad for his landmark contribution to bio-medical mathematics, one of the most emerging areas of applied mathematics. In his opinion, with the application of mathematical methods most problems relatto biology or medicine can be solved. Prof Misra, however, alerted that mathematical treatment of life science problems should not be viewed as an alternative to experimentation.
Mathematics, if used in an appropriate manner, can enrich the fields of biology and medicine, he added. Prof Misra informed that attempts to apply the fundamental principles of mathematics and physics to the study of living being is not a new phenomena. It has existed over the centuries. Although Galileo is famous for his unique contributions to physics, he was originally a student of medicine and made some fundamental contributions to physiology and medicine. He used his discovery of the constancy of a pendulum to measure the pulse rate of the human heart and expressed the results quantitatively in terms of the length of a pendulum being synchronous with heart beat. “Galileo propounded that mathematics was the essential key to science without which nature could not be properly studied”.
Prof Misra further said that several mathematicians like Descartes, Borelli and Euler were inspired to treat different physiological problems mathematically while physicists ~ Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Thomas Young, Hermann von Helmholtz, Otto Frank, Sir JC Bose and B van der Pol ~ are some of those who have made remarkable contributions to physiology and medicine. “Indeed, what a scientist picks up and works on, may depend a great deal on chance and the biological world is so rich a field that one should not permit the opportunities to slip by unnoticed”, the scientist remarked.
The excellent mathematical models developed by Prof Misra for studies pertaining to DNA knots and links, bifurcation and chaos in population dynamics , physiological fluid dynamics, mechanics of fracture and re-modelling of bones, cerebral concussion, peristaltic flows of physiological fluids and computational analysis of genes have been acclaimed across the world.
According to IIT sources, Prof Misra has so far published a dozen of advanced level books on mathematical sciences besides the publication of 160 research papers in some of the leading international journals for the benefit of researchers. In recognition of significant impact of his mathematical models in the field of biomedical engineering, Prof Misra’s name was suggested for the prestigious fellowship of the Royal Society of Medicine, London, Indian National Academy of Engineering, New Delhi, Institute of Mathematics and Applications, UK and National Academy of Sciences, India.
His outstanding contribution to mathematics has fetched him several coveted awards like the Raja Ram Mohan Prlize 2004, Rashtriya Gourav Award 2004, IIT Silver Jubilee Research Award i1984, the Humboldt Fellowship Award D.Sc degree in applied mathematics from Calcutta University, membership of the Expert Committee of the National Science Foundation of USA, Imperial Press of UK and World Scientific, Singapore as well as Associate Editorship of International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control, Japan.

source...The Statesman

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