Is Neena Gupta the 1st Indian Woman to Win Ramanujan Prize? No, Claim is False!

Gupta is the fourth Indian mathematician and the second Indian woman to receive this honour.

Fact-Check | The claim stating Neena Gupta is the first Indian woman to receive the Ramanujan Prize is false.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

A set of pictures of Indian mathematician Neena Gupta is being shared on social media platforms with a claim that she is the first and only Indian woman to receive the Ramanujan award.

An archive of the post can be seen here.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

(Archives of similar claims can be found here, here, and here.)

What is the Ramanujan prize?: The DST-ICTP-IMU Ramanujan Prize is awarded to young mathematicians who are below 45 years of age and from developing countries for conducting outstanding research.

• It was started in 2005. The selection committee is appointed by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), and the International Mathematical Union (IMU).

The truth: Gupta received the award in 2021 and became the fourth Indian mathematician and the second Indian woman to achieve this honour.

How did we find out?: A keyword search led us to a press release published by the Ministry of Information and Technology on 10 December 2021 on the Press Information Bureau (PIB) website.

• It mentioned that Neena Gupta, a mathematician at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, became the third woman to receive the Ramanujan Prize.

• She was awarded for her work in commutative algebra and affine algebraic geometry.

• Gupta had also solved the Zariski cancellation problem for affine spaces for which she received the Young Scientists Award of the Indian National Science Academy in 2014.

The press release mentioned that Gupta is the third woman to receive this honour.

(Source: PIB website/Screenshot)

• Further, we went through the ICTP website and came across the list of people who have received the prize.

• It showed that Gupta was overall the fourth Indian mathematician and the second Indian woman to receive this award.

• Sujatha Ramdorai of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) was awarded in 2006, Amalendu Krishna of TIFR in 2015, and Ritabrata Munshi of ISI and TIFR in 2018.

The list shows that Gupta became the second Indian woman to receive this honour.

(Source: ICTP website/Screenshot)

Who was the first Indian woman awardee?: Sujatha Ramdorai was the first Indian woman to be awarded the Ramanujan Prize in 2006 to recognise her contribution to the non-commutative Iwasawa theory and her work on arithmetic of algebraic varieties.

Ramdorai was the first Indian woman to be awarded the said prize.

(Source: ICTP website/Screenshot)

Conclusion: Neena Gupta is the second Indian woman to receive the Ramanujan Prize after Sujatha Ramdorai and not the first one, as claimed.

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