There are several individuals in the list
On Wednesday, Indian origin Australian Akshay Venkatesh became the receipient of the prestegious Fields Medal, which is considered by many as the Nobel Prize for mathematics.
Akshay became the second person of Indian origin to win this medal. Earlier, Canadian national Manjul Bhargava won it in 2014.
A number of people of Indian origin have won prestegious prizes, including the Nobel Prize, the Man Booker Prize, as well as the Pulitzer. And of course, let us not forget Sunita Williams, the American astronaut, who was part of the International Space Station (ISS) mission, and formally held the record for most hours walked by a woman in space i.e. 50 hours and 40 minutes. Incidentally, she also ran the Boston Marathon while she was onboard the ISS.
These people may not be citzens of India, but most of them still have an emotional connect with the nation.
Here, we take a look at some of these individuals who have made a difference because of their work in the sceintific and the literary field.
1. Akshay Venkatesh
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Akshay Venkatesh, a renowned Indian-Australian mathematician, is one of four winners of mathematics' prestigious Fields medal, known as the Nobel prize for math. The Fields medals are awarded every four years to the most promising mathematicians under the age of 40. New Delhi-born Venkatesh, 36, who is currently teaching at Stanford University, has won the Fields Medal for his profound contributions to an exceptionally broad range of subjects in mathematics.
2. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
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Tamil Nadu-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009. Born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Ramakrishnan shares the Nobel with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel) for their "studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".
3. Har Gobind Khorana
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In the year 1968, Har Gobind Khorana, along with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for discovering the order of nucleotides in DNA determines which amino acids (the fundamental building blocks of proteins) are built. Nucleotides, the subunits of DNA and RNA, are made out of nitrogen. There are four types of nucleotides in DNA and RNA, and the order in which they are placed determines the structure of the double helix – the shape that makes up each of our DNA molecules.
4. Sunita Williams
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Williams was launched to the International Space Station (ISS) with STS-116, aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, on December 9, 2006, to join the Expedition 14 crew. Among the personal items Williams took with her to the ISS were a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a Ganesha idol, and some samosas. She formerly held the records for total spacewalks by a woman (seven) and most spacewalk time for a woman (50 hours, 40 minutes)
5. Manjul Bhargava
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Bhargava, who won the Fields Medal in 2014, popularly known as the Mathematics Nobel, said that he never went to a maths class and credited his mother for his success. Asked about suggestions to make the subject more interesting for students, he said, "It should be taught with puzzles, games, some magic and even music and poems. There are many ways but it should not be taught in a dry manner or rote method by which students tend to mug up things."
6. Siddhartha Mukherjee
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Mukherjee, best known for the 2010 book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer", for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and an award from The Guardian, was awared with the Padma Shree in 2014
7. Salman Rushdie
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Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two separate occasions. In June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him thirteenth on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
