Story
Prof. Manindra Agrawal of IIT Kanpur, with his students Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena, discovered in 2002 the first unconditional deterministic polynomial-time algorithm to test whether a number is prime. Their paper 'PRIMES is in P' answered a question mathematicians had asked for centuries. He became Director of IIT Kanpur in 2024 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2026.
Key contributions
- AKS primality test (2002), published in the Annals of Mathematics
- Gödel Prize and Fulkerson Prize (2006); Infosys Prize (2008)
- Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (2003); Padma Shri (2013)
- Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, London (2026)
- Research in complexity theory, algebraic algorithms and cryptography