Helping India to take her due place in the mathematical world

India has experienced a very long drought in Mathematics research. While several Math luminaries of Indian origin have achieved global recognition, India does not yet carry her proportionate weight in the world of Mathematics.

I am an independent research mathematician settled in Canada for more than five decades. Before the advent of the Google era, I founded the MathCamp summer camp Canada which later moved to the USA in its fourth year and was renamed the Canada/USA MathCamp, serving highschool students in both countries. Since then, my journey has been fulfilling, leading to the establishment of MathPath for middle school students and Epsilon Camp for students aged 7 to 12. Through these camps, thousands of students from the United States and around the world have flourished in Mathematics.

But now that I am in my late 70’s, I feel the urge to do something for my native country, my motherland – India. I grew up in a quaint village in Kerala but was fortunate to discover my passion for Mathematics and later moved to Canada in my 20s. In the US, I had the privilege of collaborating with some legendary mathematicians, including the late John Conway, who worked with me at the camps for over two decades. During 2017 and 2018, I met students from India who travelled all the way to the US to attend the month-long summer camp for highly gifted students, and that got me thinking.

My mind wandered back to India, a country with a strong history of mathematical brilliance, with figures like Aryabhata and Ramanujan leading the way, and with a recent track record of producing some of the highest numbers of STEM graduates in the world. In Raising a Mathematician (RAM) foundation, I found an ally. It was not difficult for me to structure a programme like Epsilon India in collaboration with like-minded and passionate educators. The greatest resource of a nation is its gifted students and not all of them come from well-off families. Today we have a world-class international level camp in India where parents do not have to pay thousands of dollars to send their children all the way to a foreign country.

Many gifted students struggle in the typical school setting, where large class sizes and a wide range of abilities in subjects like Mathematics make it hard for them to thrive. Often, highly capable students are seen as disruptive by asking too many questions or are labelled as "nerds" by their classmates, which affects their social lives. Parents of such students need extensive support to help raise these young geniuses. At this camp, there are workshops and sessions designed exclusively for parents who often cannot find a community of people facing similar challenges in raising high-ability children.

Epsilon India Camps bring these outliers together, creating a community that continues to support them even after the programmes conclude. A recent example is a group of Epsilon India parents from Chennai, who came together to form a Maths Circle for Math enthusiasts in Chennai, ensuring that many more students like their children will receive year-round support and nurturing in Mathematics.

Instruction at Epsilon India Camp is more Socratic than monologue pieces. The instructors are published mathematicians and computer scientists. Students who come here are not just class toppers but are advanced beyond their age in Mathematics. In the 2-week residential camp, students 9 to 13 years of age typically attend three undergraduate-level courses each day. They also get to work on challenging assignments which are graded by teaching assistants (TAs) who are UG, Masters or PhD students from premier institutions like IISERs, Chennai Mathematical Institute, Azim Premji University, etc.

Among the large number of young people interested in Mathematics, many are also passionate about the subject. To nurture such young geniuses, there is a need for appropriate pedagogy and mentoring that extends beyond camps and summer programmes to the everyday school curriculum. The enduring solution is to ensure that our young population remains mathematically strong, as this is where future mathematicians will emerge. Until then, camps like Epsilon India will continue to play a vital role.

Details on the camp can be found at www.epsilonindia.org.

Dr G Rubin Thomas is a veteran research mathematician and author whose life work has been mentoring young students showing high promise in Mathematics. He founded the prestigious Canada/USA MathCamp, MathPath and Epsilon Camp. Dr Thomas’ research has ranged over Semigroups and Extremal Graph Theory with forays in Analytical Number Theory.