Manindra Agrawal Elected Fellow of the Royal Society

Key facts

• Manindra Agrawal, Director of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT Kanpur), has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
• The Royal Society is the national academy of sciences of the United Kingdom, founded in 1660.
• Agrawal was recognised for his contributions to theoretical computer science, specifically the development of the AKS primality test in 2002 along with Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena.
• The AKS primality test is the first unconditional deterministic polynomial-time algorithm capable of proving whether a number is prime.
• Agrawal has previously received the Gödel Prize and the Fulkerson Prize for his research.
• Other Indian and Indian-origin Fellows of the Royal Society include Ardaseer Cursetjee (first in 1841), Srinivasa Ramanujan, C. V. Raman, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Homi J. Bhabha, and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.