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I N F. E R E N. C E
JANUARY 2011 DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS IIT KHARAGPUR

From the Editor’s Desk

It is our privilege to present to you, our dear readers and fellow department mates, the third edition of
Inference. As before, the objective of this department newsletter is to keep the members of our little community
abreast of new tidings, publicize activities of the Mathematics Colloquium, share tales from the road by successful
interns, and anything else that might be of interest to a mathematically minded fraternity.

It is needless to say that the previous year had been an eventful one for the Mathematics Department. The
maiden edition of the Regional Symposium on Mathematics managed to create quite the buzz, attracting
attention from outsiders and neighbouring departments alike. And then came the graduation of the first UG batch
of SI - with 17 placed out of 19 registered students and several successful applications , this was refreshing news
for all of us. It is also pleasing to note that the highest placement packages were bagged by our own students.

Aside from our regular annual itinerary, we witnessed a fun diversion this year with a Departmental Cricket
League (coverage of which is included on this page). Hopefully we shall see several other enjoyable recourses to
the daily academic grind.

This note would be incomplete without a mention about a rather significant administrative change at the helm -
the appointment of Professor PD Srivastava as our new Head of Department. We are grateful for the excellent
services rendered by former Head, Professor AR Roy, and wish Prof. Srivastava all the best as he embarks upon
his tenure. It is hoped that he can carry our department to new heights of achievement.
We sincerely hope that you find this issue of Inference enjoyable. We would love to hear from you, be it
feedback, suggestions or even just random ideas. Do feel free to write t us at contact.maths@gmail.com

-The Inference Team

There is no need to remind anyone what cricket is to Indians. It is profession no hope as a total of 6 was scored in the first two overs. Then
for some, leisure for many and as some claim, it’s their religion. And it everyone witnessed a very slow yet promising comeback by
displayed its elegance and excellence yet again as the professors and âeta with the Colloquium president, Ahmad, being the savior.
students of the Department of Mathematics decided to hit the field this time. But no one expected the final result, as in a thrilling climax, the
Now, this is the first time that there has been a sports event in which the batting team lost 3 wickets in almost no time, to fall short of
organisers and participants have been exclusively from the Department of their aim. The âeta innings ended with their score at 48.
Mathematics. Professor G.P. Rajashekhar came up with the idea, the idea
which would eventually materialise into the Mathematics Cricket League. So it went. Winner and loser both had a smile as they strolled
back to the pavilion to have their share of
On the morning of 29th August, a refreshments, much of which was
bright sunny Saturday, Tata Sports already taken care of by the gentlemen
Complex was ready to witness the in the pavilion. Everybody was relieved
occasion, the first of its kind. The and happy after a the body-warming,
ground and pavilion were ready. The mind-refreshing two hours. When the
players started warming up. Prof. victorious captain and player of the
Somesh Kumar, Prof. Ashish Ganguly, match Prof. Somesh Kumar was asked
Prof. D.K. Gupta, Prof. A. Goswami to share his thoughts about the match,
and Prof. S. Bhattacharya, showed up he said “I had a great time and a lot of
early to set themselves into motion.
Everybody was excited, especially our
professors, who were determined to
cricket exercise”, gathering his breath. All the
professors said that they were very
happy that MCL happened, and would
bring out the hidden sportsman in
them. The two teams, álpha and âeta, league be looking forward to more events which
would bring the students and their
led by Prof. Somesh Kumar and Prof. teacher closer. The participation of first
D.K. Gupta respectively, set out to years, though less in number, brought
play. The openers of álpha started things off immediately with a few fours in fresh spirit to the field. The energy of final and pre-final years
the first two overs. The captain was in terrific form, hitting the ball hard and was commendable too. The only low side, as expressed by the
making runs. But eventually álpha lost wickets and slowed down. But Prof. faculty, was the low participation from the students. But now
Somesh Kumar held things together, as the air grew hotter, and helped that the seeds are sown, one can really expect loads of thrill,
álpha reach a score of 54 from 8 overs. Then âeta went out to bat to score fun, sweat and energy in the years to come. After the
the 55 runs they needed to win. Meanwhile the pavilion was the hotspot of professors left, the students continued playing for sometime
excitement as there was continuous commentary delivered by off-field before everyone called it a day. The first MCL thus concluded
players, who were more sarcastic than descriptive. Also, there were plenty in high spirits, great hopes and lots of fun, promising much
of refreshments to rejuvenate the players. The second innings began with more in the future.

In October, we were informed that it would not be possible for us to have the second edition of the Regional
RSM Symposium on Mathematics due to some internal issues within the institute. Not continuing with RSM this year, the
Department has other plans, much like the RSM, but not on the scale in which we wanted it to be. We will be having
NEWS guest lectures by eminent professors of the nation. We would also be having enjoyable workshops. And we are
trying to make it as good as you wanted it to be. So be ready to be a part of the endeavour. 1
 JANUARY 2011

BarCap and the Google Code

Nikhil Sarda summarizes his internship at Barclays Capital
I interned in Barclays
Capital, GSDC Singapore this
summer. My team was
responsible for the
development and support of
a PnL and Risk reporting tool
called T0PL which served the
needs of the Fixed Income
trading desk.The project
assigned to me was being
monitored by executives in
London, so I was under
pressure from day one to
deliver and deliver well.
My work involved
developing a generic feed
writer utilizing templating
engines that would be used
to allow TOPL to generate
feeds of any specification. I
was then asked to develop an
application specific feed that
utilized the framework I had
developed. Implementing the
above required me to learn
several different APIs as well
as familiarize myself with the
working of several
technologies. Barcap takes
QA very seriously and
requires developers to
thoroughly ensure that any
commited code is high
quality and is easily
maintainable. No distintion is
made between interns and
full time employees. Barcap is
a reasonably diverse
company. although over 40%
of their employees in
Singapore happen to be
Indians!This diversity
allowed for a cultural
exchange that is non-existent
in an Indian firm. Overall it
was a tiring and hectic but
truly rewarding experience.

Niagara Maple French Gottingen, Germany

Bibhas Kumar Jha
When I was in my second
year, I got this ‘AI’ a.k.a.
Artificial Intelligence itch
which got even more intense
after I got to learn many
things about it at ISI Kolkata.
It made me so buoyant that I
mailed to some of the best
scientists working in this area
to hire me as summer intern.
Luckily, the research team
head at Defence Research
and Development Canada
(DRDC) got somehow
interested in my
profile.Next day
we had a 45
m i n u t e
discussion on
phone which
ended in he
b e i n g
impressed with
my answers.I
w a s v e r y
excited to work under the
great scientist but then I
received a mail saying that I
would have to work under
another professor who was
taking care of his projects.
Finally, I landed in a all-french
place at Universite Laval
which is the oldest center of
education in Canada .
My project was to
design a classifier which was
actually a combination of
many different classifiers,
often known as mixture of
experts. There have been
many experiments in this
regard but what we did was
remarkably different in the
way that we applied genetic
programming to evolve fuzzy
decision trees with nodes as
classifiers. The complexity of
such a system will be a huge.
And, I was therefore granted
access to the second best
supercomputer in Canada
(clumeq). I was so happy to
have a user account on a
supercomputer
with more than
8,000 cores.
The project was
a success
finally, although
it took hours to
run even on that
giant computer.
Apart
f r o m
supercomputing experience
and learning so many new
things, I even had a great out-
of-lab experience. Things I
liked most in Canada are the
breathtakingly beautiful
Niagra Falls, thrilling height
of CN tower and its glass
floor at 1122 ft, the big St.
Lawrence river and 1000
islands, biggest casino of
Canada-Casino de Montreal,
bungee jumping, hangouts at
Starbucks, delicious French
food, etc.
Siddharth Banerjee
I got a chance to
pursue my internship this
year at the Georg August
Universtat Gottingen in
Germany. This city has a
history and charm of its own.
It is a small city, and the
students form the life of
Gottingen. I stayed at a place
called Mahatma Gandhi
House, and it was great to be
there, because in that
apartment, around 60% of
students
living were
from Asia
and Africa.
Hence I
c o u l d
interact with
a n
extremely
d i v e r s e
crowd of
people. The people were
friendly, and one of the
major attractions was a party
held during which we got to
taste cuisines from
practically all of Europe,
middle east, Indian
subcontinent, East Asia and a
couple of African dishes. her.
Students from different parts
of Asia and Europe showing
off their traditional dance, in
their traditional attire, and to
the tune of folk songs from
their own religion, was an
awesome sight to behold.
Regarding my work,
it was related to compressing
words of Free Group. A free
group is a Group with a
subset S, such that every
element of Group can be
written as exactly one way as
an addition of elements of S.
Example, set {0,1,2} defined
above is not a group, as
1=0(+)1 = 1(+)1(+)1(+)1 (not
unique, for many S), but the
set of even integers is a Free
Group, with
S={2}. My work
was to develop
an efficient
algorithm to
evaluate a
string of
elements of
free group in
the least
possible time.
Example, a(+) b (+) a(+) b (+) a
(+)b(+)a(+)b takes 7
operations[(+)] to compute.
There are some other
algorithms which I had to
write, to find some other
properties of already
compressed words.
The other major
attraction in the internship
was the various places that
I, along with my friends
visited throughout Europe.
Overall my internship was
an apt combination of both
studies and fun.

MIKESH UDANI DESCRIBES HIS CMU EXPERIENCE

While I was applying to Internships last year, incidentally,
one of the professors under whom I had worked, was the
first one to reply to my mail. I applied to the winter school
she suggested and eventually got selected for two projects
at Carnegie Mellon University. One of them, on 'Audio Visual
Diarization', was based on speech and video processing. We
were coming up with a system that, given a video clip
involving number of characters, say a movie, would give a
folder of clips for each character. I also worked on 'Detection
of Transactivity and Reasoning in Speech. The culture of
CMU was completely different from any other university I
have been to. While being guided by experts in the field, I
had enough freedom and opportunity to implement my own
ideas. I had long discussions with my professors several
times a week, on various topics ranging from the project
and academics to student life and culture in the US.
Interacting with graduate and PhD students there gave a
better insight on graduate studies in universities abroad.
Awesomely, they all, including professors there, knew
about IIT and held it in high esteem! Academically and
otherwise, the ten weeks of my internship were some of the
best I've ever spent.
 I NFERENCE # JANUARY 2011

Face to Face with Dr. A.R. Roy

Prof A.R. Roy is the senior most faculty of the department and had been the head of the
department for the last three years. With a new head now in chair, we, the Mathematics
Colloquium, decided to ask the experienced man about some of his thoughts and opinions about

Colloquium: How do you feel now, after being the head for
3 years, and now handing the responsibility over to
someone else?
Prof Roy: There’s not much of a difference. I have been taking
important responsibilities for the last 30 years, and I have
enjoyed taking such a responsibility. Being the head was one
such responsibility, and I’m as satisfied as ever of course now
facing some new situations, which I could meet to my
satisfaction.
Colloquium: How was your experience as the head?
Prof Roy: As I mentioned, I was very satisfied with the
responsibility, though of a new type. I enjoyed facing new
situations in both academic and administrative fronts. I was
more so happy that I could take out time from taking my
regular classes and some research. The responsibility as Head
never seemed monotonous to me.
Colloquium: What aim did you have in mind after you
became the head?
Prof Roy: I wanted to do everything for the betterment of the
department , within my limits. I had the basic aim of recruiting
some good faculty and I am happy that we could recruit some
good ones.
Colloquium: What do you think about the changes that
have taken place during your tenure, like the suspension
of the Statistics and Informatics course ?
Colloquium: The changes in the academic
performance of students?
Prof Roy: The academic performance has maintained
more or less the same level, but there has been some
improvement. The attendance, which has significant
“I enjoyed facing new situations in both academic and
administrative fronts...The responsibility as Head never
seemed monotonous to me.”
effect in the academic performance of students has
improved considerably. If you go through the placement
statistics, you will see that the students of our department
performed very well and finally got placements in reputed
organizations.
Colloquium: Your views about the increasing number
of students.
Prof Roy: The number of students has been increasing at a
very rapid pace. It is good for the department if number of
students increase, but as you can see the department
does not have the proper infrastructure to manage so
many students. The space in our dept. classrooms is
inadequate to accommodate the present strength . We
have to wait till the new academic complex is completed,
which, as I understand, may take a couple of years more
to start functioning. The more early, the better. Presently,
the dept. has arranged for taking some classes in large
rooms viz., Raman and Bhatnagar auditoriums.

Prof Roy: As regards the suspension of the two SI courses the
primary reasons were the lack of core faculty with relevant
expertise in different topics of statistics and in particular of
informatics. With the hope of getting good faculty, both in
number and quality, the department was happy to start the
courses but then finally we failed in our mission. I would have
loved to see that with a properly framed syllabus with
adequate expertise in the area a course on Statistics and
Informatics runs in this department.
Colloquium: What do you think should be the primary
plan for the new head?
Prof Roy: Every individual has his own style of functioning
with his plans and programmes.. I do not feel that as the
immediate former head I should say something on the
plans of the present head. But then, I am sure his primary
aim will be towards the overall improvement of the
department.

Dr. Roy’s Final Message to the Students

Attendance holds the key priority. When you attend classes, you will learn something. And it will always be better for
you. I would be happy to see our students show respect for their teachers without which, I am afraid, overall development
of the students may not be there. Actually there should always be mutual respect amongst the teachers and the taught. I
would be happy to see that the students of our department after successful completion of their respective courses move
forward with their proposed goals. Try to keep up the IIT Kgp flags always high wherever you are. After all you are the
torch bearers of the great Institution. My Best Wishes are always with you all.

SPONSORED PROJECTS IN THE DEPARTMENT

Name of the Project Professor-in-charge Funding agency
Classification of hyperspectral remote sensing data to discriminate between crop conditions Prof. Anjan Sarkar ISRO
Wall Proximity on Bluff Body weight : Three Dimensional aspect Prof. S. Bhattacharyya CSIR
Boundary Integral Work Bench for Viscous flow through Porous Media Dr. G.P. Rajasekhar CSIR
Integration of Fuzziness and Randomness with Emphasis to Re-modeling of Inventory Problems Dr. Debjani Chakraborty DST, New Delhi
Studies on the equilibrium problems under generalized convexity and generalized monotonicity Dr. C. Nahak CSIR
Turbulence suspension over sandy bedforms: Experimental and theoretical studies Dr. Koeli Ghoshal DST, New Delhi
Electro-osmotic flow and mixing in a charged mico and nano-channels Prof. S. Bhattacharyya DST, New Delhi
Localization and navigation using semantics (thematic) Prof. Anjan Sarkar European Aeronautic Defence Space
Multi objective and multi level decision making model with applications regional planning Prof. M.P. Biswal DST, New Delhi
Numerical investigation of stability and convective transport in double diffusive media Dr. P.V.S.N. Murthy CSIR
Singularity methods for Stokes flow in presence of rigid/porous planar interface Dr. G.P. Rajasekhar CSIR
3 “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to
elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” Dr. A. R. Roy

Continuing its tradition of
organising an Orientation
Programme for the new
comers, this year also the
Mathematics Colloquium
extended a warm and hearty
welcome to the freshers of
the Department of
Mathematics where first year
undergraduates of Maths and
Computing,MSc/Phd,
Mtechs in CSDP, and
research scholars showed up
enthusiastically in V1 on 12th
of August,2010 all dressed
up formally.
Gracing the occasion
with their presence were Prof
Rajashekhar,Prof.Somesh
Kumar, Prof. Goswami, Prof.
Ganguly, Prof. Sarkar, Prof.
J.Kumar and of course the
Head of Department, Dr. Roy.
Rohith Mohan Suvvari,
Vice President of the
Colloquium, began the
proceedings by a brief
welcome note to the students
and professors. Then Literary
Here's hoping all the freshers have a really good time here in the Maths Department !
The 3rd of September saw the
Mathematics Seminar room
ready for another celebration
of the teacher’s day and the
evening promised lots of
celebration, fun and
enjoyment. With the faculty
members and students
already settled, the
celebration started.
Professors were there to
grace the occasion. Things
started off with the general
secretary of the colloquium,
Seemant Ujjain, wishing all
our professors a happy
teacher’s day. This was
followed by a warm speech by
Prof. A. R. Roy, as he
highlighted the importance
of a healthy teacher-student
relationship. The cake was
4 “None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody -
a parent, a teacher, who bent down and helped us pick up our boots” - Thurgood Marshall
I NFERENCE # JANUARY, 2011
Freshers’ Introduction
Secretary, Shikha Singh, gave
a presentation introducing
the freshers to the
Department of Mathematics,
its history, the Colloquium
and its activities. The
presentation also had
glimpses of the placement
statistics, research areas,
scholarships opportunities
and internships.
Professor A.R. Roy, Head
of Department, gave a
welcome speech on behalf of
faculty of the Department. He
addressed the young and
keen faces, encouraging
them to participate in all
Teachers’ Day 2010
cut by Prof. Roy and Prof.
Srivastava, and snacks were
served, along with the cake.
The professors gifted the
students with chocolates and
pens.
Then it was time for fun as the
professors were presented
with peppy questions about
their experiences as a
student and with students
like ‘How often did you bunk
classes?’, which they drew
from a bowlful of chits. And
the professors did answer
joyfully, with an occasional
word or two about how
students should be serious in
life.
Then it was time for the
popular Maths Quiz. Three
teams were made, each with
departmental activities and
to approach the faculty
without hesitation for
support and guidance.
The long awaited
Fresher Introductions began.
Starting with the Research
Scholars, we then had
undergraduate 1st years and
CSDP students, coming to the
stage, most of them peach
faced, fumbling through
introductions and turning to
a shade of scarlet when
subject to queer questions
from seniors. But many
astounded the audience by
their exceptional
two or three professors and
students, having the
favourite names of the
department, alpha, beta and
gamma. The general
secretaries of the colloquium
Rachit and Seemant were
performing the duties of
quizmasters throwing
challenging and nerve-
wrecking questions at the
team. Ranging from
t h e o r e m s t o a
mathematician’s personal
life, they had all the
questions. The teams were
enthralled as the contest ran
very close. After 4 rigorous
rounds of questions, thrill,
calculations and occasional
confusion about the scoring,
the quiz came to an end.
performances. The whole
room resonated with the self
composed guitar solo by the
short bespectacled Anirban
Mandal, who drew a huge
applause from one and all. A
group of freshers even put
up a play they had prepared
and some even danced,
proving that they were so
much more than just geeks.
It was a fun filled evening,
with Bhojpuri songs (the
most popular request from
the math loving audience),
Gazals and Shayari and
some rapping (very bad
one's).
As the clock ticked
and hunger of the audience
grew, people became
restless, more so as a lavish
feast was waiting for them
just outside the door. So the
evening ended with the
introduction of the
Colloquium members and
the delicious food ofcourse.
Before winding up, there
were prizes distributed to the
winner, runner-up an even
the second runner-up of the
quiz. There were prizes for
the winners of the Maths
League contest. The trophy
and prizes for the Cricket
match was also given away.
We welcome our new
faculty Prof. A. Ganguly.
Hope he has a wonderful
time here with us.
 I NFERENCE # JANUARY 2011

Present 5th Years Internship Stats

NAME UNIVERSITY / COMPANY DESCRIPTION
Aseem Heidelberg university, Germany Implemented a cell sorting algorithm for a 2D lattice model
Shashank Gupta Amazon.com, Hyderabad Designing and Implementing an Interface for Cache Diff
NVD Rajeev Varma Annex IT solutions, Hyderabad Network Banking
P V Goutham Kushal Annex IT solutions, Hyderabad Network Banking
Prabhdeep Singh Appnomic, Bangalore Short-term forecasting of transaction load on application server
Nikhil Sarda Barclays Capital, Singapore Implementing a generic feed framework for T0PL
Pronoy Sikdar Deloitte Consulting India Pvt Ltd, Mumbai ADA Compliant Web GUI Development Using Web 2.0 Technologies
Ujjwal Ankur Deloitte Consulting India Pvt Ltd, Hyderabad Data Enrichment through De-duplication and Rule-based Grouping
Smarpit Menon Franklin Templeton Investments, Hyderabad Optimal Glidepath selection for Target Date Funds
Arnov Kumar Global Analytics Pvt Ltd, Chennai Development of internal intranet application tool.
Anshul Kamra ICICI Bank, Mumbai Developing a Current Account Customer Attrition Scorecard
Shrikant Soni IIM Bangalore, Bangalore Computational Analysis of the Performance of Supply Chain Market
Vibhav Viswanathan ITC Limited, Guntur Pricing discovery model
Amrit Anand JLU Giessen, Germany Modeling Inflation and interest rates in Continuous time.
Ashish Prasad SKS Microfinance Ltd., Hyderabad Statistical model to forecast amount disbursed
Vikash Chandra Sharma SMST, IIT Kharagpur Time Series Modeling of RR Interval
Dev Jyoti Behera SUPSI, Switzerland Designing a benchmarking tool for Semantic Web stores
Anuranjan Kumar University of Bremen, Germany Mesh Generation for Stefan Problems, Using Finite Element Method
Saptarshi Mandal University of Bremen, Germany solution for the Stationary problem of Linear Elasticity
Angadhjot Hundal University of California, Berkeley, US Comparison between TopHat and the Junction Database Method.
Devashish Ghosh University of Lille1, France Development of simulator for Rule Based Reaction Schemas
Suvrat Hiran Yahoo!, Banagalore Use of word relatedness to improve online advertising
Rahul B Yahoo! Analytics, Bangalore Estimate Unique User

Appeal Mathematics and the last decade

Though third years are allowed to take courses like
Foundations of Computing and Operations Resereach in
CS and IM department respectively, the course structure
matches exorbitantly with our Department courses of
Finite Automata and Formal Languages and Operation
Research itself. Students are advised not to take these
courses.
The authorities have decided not to reimburse the twenty
thousand of Inspire Scholarship that students were
expecting saying that students need not go outside India
for their projects as the standards are very high here and
mostly the host institutes refund whatever expenses are
incurred.
For mathematicians, the most important announcement
of the decade came from the Russian researcher Grigori
Perelman, in 2002. His proof of the Poincaré Conjecture
and Thurston's Geometrisation Conjecture – two of the
most important open problems in mathematics – was a
huge breakthrough in our understanding of three-
dimensional spaces: possible alternatives to the familiar
Euclidean space, in which we fondly imagine that we live.
Over the next 10 years, what might we hope for? A long
shot is a solution to the Riemann Hypothesis, an even
more important unsolved problem in number theory. If
the method could be extended to more general questions
of the same type, which is quite likely, it would
revolutionise several other areas of mathematics.

Projects Undertaken by Present 4th Years

NAME OF STUDENT COMPANY/UNIVERSITY DESCRIPTION OF WORK
Saurav Biswas Jacobs University , Bremen, Germany Establishing Neurodynamical models for speech recognition .
Bishwajeet Mahato Ogilvy & Mather, Bangalore Analysis of effect of marketing in the Buying Pattern of IBM business partners
Siddhartha Banerjee Georg August Universitat Gottingen, Germany algorithm to compress a word of a Free Group in GAP software platform.
Bibhash Kumar Jha Laval Universite, Canada Combination of different classifiers in a fuzzy decision tree
Mikesh Udani Carnegie Mellon University, USA Audio visual diarization and Detection of reasoning in conversations
Kalyan Asis Sahoo University of Southern California, USA Performance analysis and automatic request categorization of internet services
Ankit Pat Indian Academy of Science (Mumbai University) Graphs and Algorithms - Network Flow Problems. Baranyai's Theorem.
Subhadeep Paul University of Turku, Finland Effect of Pravastatin on blood flow in diabetes patients
Nikita Mishra Microsoft Research, Bangalore Data Mining: Statistical techniques for Web-Query Understanding
Arpit Gupta University of Porto, Portugal The combinatorics of Parking Functions and Shi Arrangements
Abhirup Mallik University of Coruna, Spain Statistical classification and simulation based study of European woods.
Abhishek Narain University of Illinois, USA Mathematical Modelling of anomalous Diffusion in Tissue Engineered Cartilage
Animesh Srivastava Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria Enhancing the functionality of R based package Runuran.

Forest Fun Technolgy Train

Our Department is Railway Minister
organising a picnic for Mamata Banerjee has
the faculty members, announced that a special
research scholars and express train will be
students. The purpose launched to promote
is to provide an information technology
opportunity to mix up (IT) across the country. It
with friends, share will start from Kharagpur
some quality time with and our department will be
professors, and have assisting in the
food and fun. Its on preperation of exhibits. A
6th of February in the total of 6-10 coaches will
Hijli forest area near Prem Bazar. So get ready to see be dedicated to IT and the train is expected in August,2011.
the professors again on the field after MCL!
3
“Except in mathematics, the shortest distance between point A and point B is seldom a straight line”
Author Unknown
 I NFERENCE # JANUARY 2011

The
Travelling
Salesman
Problem in
Real Life..

Will this be your answer

next time you appear for
an exam..:P

Its not about words...

We've all proven theorems and identities via traditional pen-and-paper methods, wherein each step is a systematic,
logical step succeeding the last; but how about a different paradigm - proof without words - for serious mathematical
problems? Being able to devise such a proof should, quite naturally, provide as much (if not more so) of the aesthetic
rush that mathematicians so professionally appreciate. Here are a few examples. Can you construct some of your own?

Proof of:
1+2+3+...+n-1= nC2
The yellow dots are the
sum of the first n
numbers. Choosing two How does this prove the
of the n+1 blue dots given inequality?
uniquely specifies a Think about this..!!!
yellow dot in a bijective Maths League Problem
fashion 4

Of course, one must be wary of the potential pitfalls of using

visualizations in lieu of formal written proofs, as one's eyes are Golden Quadrilateral and
easily deceived. For instance, here's the "standard" proof that the Fibonacci series
32.5 = 31.5:

If Alice collaborates with Paul Erdõs on one paper, and with Bob on
another, but Bob never collaborates with Erdõs himself, then Bob
is given an Erdõs number of 2, as he is two steps from Erdõs.
ERDOS NUMBER
(Check Wikipedia)

Maths League
1) How many ways are there to put the numbers {1; 2; : : : ; 2n } into a 2xn array so
that rows and columns are in increasing order from left to right and from top to
bottom?
The Inference
For example one solution when n = 5 is | 12458 | Team
| 3 6 7 9 10 |
Editor:
2) On a given circle , six points A ,B ,C ,D , E and F are chosen at random, Arvind Soumyan
independently and uniformly with respect to arc length. Determine the probability that
the two triangles ABC and DEF are disjoint, i.e. have no common points.
Sub-Editors:
3) How many positive integers, n, are possible which satisfy the following property: Shikha Singh
Let b be the number obtained by summing the digits of n and let c be the number Sourav Roy
obtained by writing b in reverse. Then n = b * c.

4) Explain the proof without words(above section) top right figure. Design:
Rachit Murarka
Mail your answers to contact.maths@gmail.com to win new dep T-Shirt and cash prize. Bipul Karnani

“The greatest feature of an intelligent person is that he is greedy. If you are not greedy 6
then you are not intelligent. ” Dr. Pawan Kumar