India Just Built a Research Monastery for Mathematicians
A Fields Medallist, billionaire backing, and a radical theory about how breakthroughs actually happen
Manjul Bhargava, the Princeton genius who won mathematics’ highest honour, is now running an institute in Mumbai that refuses to teach anyone.
No classrooms. No degrees. No students. Just pure, uninterrupted research.
Welcome to the Lodha Mathematical Sciences Institute.
Here’s the thing—this isn’t some ivory tower vanity project. The Lodha Foundation is backing it with patient capital that thinks in 25-50 year cycles. The scientific advisory board pulls from Princeton, Stanford, TIFR, and Chennai Mathematical Institute. And the founding director, Vijaya Kumar Murty, has one conviction that borders on provocation: “Maths is easy. Calculus, I can teach you in one afternoon.”
So why build a research monastery when India desperately needs math teachers?
Because the world is running out of mathematics faster than it can use it.
AI is hitting theoretical walls that engineering can’t fix. Climate models need frameworks that don’t exist yet. Cryptography, epidemiology, quantum computing—all queuing up for tools mathematicians haven’t invented.
The flow has reversed. Applications are now desperately seeking mathematics.
But critics aren’t convinced. Can an institute that deliberately avoids classrooms help a country where 19 out of 20 people hate math by graduation?
LMSI’s answer: you don’t reach Everest without basecamps.
Whether that bet pays off will take decades. The full story is worth your time.
Wow this has to be the most stupid article I have read in a long time, lmao, I’m glad the VK Murthy and the philanthropists are not as dim witted as this articles writer. I don’t want to be so insulting but this article forces me to.
Actually, any moderately intelligent person will realize India needs something exactly like LMSI, it needs many more of it, one for each state. It does not need another coaching institute dedicated to teaching students with no talent or desire to learn math. If this author ever set foot in a single hard sciences course in his life, which considering he is a journalist he probably never did, he would know that 90%+ of the students just cheat and cheese through all their courses. This is all more institutes that teach “math” will give us, more avenues for students to cheat, more ways to create credentials for people with no real skills and more lack of any research output from the most populous country in the world.
In fact the problem India has, is the exact problem Ramanujan had which was why he as a devout Hindu he had to travel all the way to England to practice mathematics. There is no ecosystem that nurtures and supports our genius, and we fortunately still produce quite a bit of genius. All the examples that this imbecile author brings up, Manjul Bhargava, Akshay Venkatesh, did not do math research in India, they left the country to do it. There’s no renowned center for mathematical research in India, India is actually just a joke in mathematical research or any sciences research, we don’t publish anything, all we do is give our citizens a pathway to leave the country to do great work. And if this articles author had his way, that is all we will be for perpetuity.
Interesting read indeed.