Professor
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
IIT Kanpur
Kanpur, India

Dr Manindra Agrawal, the 36-year-old professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, was born and schooled in Allahabad, after which he joined IIT Kanpur for the B Tech in Computer Science and Engineering. Manindra subsequently obtained his doctoral thesis in Complexity Theory in 1991 also from IIT Kanpur. He then did a three-year stint at the Chennai Mathematical Institute in Madras before bagging the prestigious Humboldt fellowship at the University of Ulm in Germany. He returned to IIT Kanpur as a member of the faculty in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 1996. Manindra Agrawal is thus a home-grown Computer Scientist who began his work on complexity theory at IIT Kanpur itself.

While also interested in Computational Number Theory and Cryptography, Manindra Agarwal is known as one of the foremost researchers in Complexity Theory. His work on the p-isomorphism conjecture has rejuvenated this field, and the strongest current result in this field is due to him. A major work on a polynomial time algorithm for primality testing has recently been announced by Manindra and his two students. This solves one of the most outstanding open problems of Mathematics and Computer Science - as prime numbers play a pivotal role in all the areas of Mathematics and Computer Science. The result is now considered as the biggest advancement in a decade in computational number theory. What has astounded the scientific community is the elegance of their solution - their algorithm is only thirteen lines long, and its proof of correctness takes less than three pages. This discovery has bought in immense prestige to India, not just to IIT Kanpur and it will certainly provide the necessary courage and impetus to the young Indian researchers to set really challenging goals, rather than work incrementally at paradigms set by the research programmes of abroad. For this work Manindra was also awarded the Clay Research Award in October, 2002.

Dr Manindra Agarwal has also received several other awards and honours. He is also a system builder. He has designed and implemented a symmetric-key algorithm Trinetra and built and productionized a crypto system for the Indian Navy. He along with a few other colleagues has also defined the Indian Smart Card operating system standards.

Dr Manindra Agrawal is conferred with the Distinguished Alumnus Award of IIT Kanpur for his outstanding contributions in Complexity Theory and by developing a Polynomial Time Algorithm for Primality Testing.