Neena Gupta is not the first Indian woman to win the Ramanujan Prize

Professor Neena Gupta is not the first Indian woman to be honoured with the Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians. Sujatha Ramdorai is the first Indian woman to win this Prize in 2006.

Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians from Developing Countries is a mathematics prize awarded annually by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Italy. The prize is named after the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. It was founded in 2004, and was first awarded in 2005. The prize is awarded to a researcher from a developing country less than 45 years of age who has conducted outstanding research in a developing country. Researchers working in any branch of the mathematical sciences are eligible for the prize that carries a $15,000 cash award.

A post has gone viral on social media claiming that Indian Mathematician Neena Gupta recently won the Ramanujan Prize, becoming the first Indian woman to win this award.

The caption of the post states, “Congratulations to 38years Mathematician lSI Professor Neena Gupta the first Indian Women winning Ramanujan award.”

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Fact Check-

We investigated the claim that Neena Gupta is the first Indian woman to receive the award and discovered that she is not. 

Neena Gupta is a professor at the Statistics and Mathematics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata became the winner of the Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians in 2021.The Kolkata-native received recognition for her “outstanding work in affine algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, in particular for her solution of the Zariski cancellation problem for affine spaces.”

Indian Express

Further, using the keyword search, we retrieved the list of winners from the website of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). The page states the profiles of all 17 winners so far.

However, the data on the ICTP website proves Neena Gupta is not the first Indian to win this award. In 2006, Sujatha Ramdorai became the first Indian woman to win this Prize. 

Other Indians who won this prize are Amalendu Krishna in 2015, Ritabrata Munshi in 2018 and Neena Gupta in 2021. As of 2021only three women won this prize, they are Sujatha Ramdorai (2006), Neena Gupta (2021) and Brazil’s Carolina Araujo (2020).

Therefore, it can be concluded that the viral post claiming Kolkata-based scholar Neena Gupta is the first Indian woman to be honoured with the Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians is misleading.

Conclusion :

Fact Crescendo found the claims made along with the viral post to be Misleading. Professor Neena Gupta is not the first Indian woman to be honoured with the Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians. Sujatha Ramdorai became the first Indian woman to receive this award in 2006.