CrEaTiVe Minds i
ANAND KUMAR - STORY OF A REAL MATHEMATICIAN,
The person
you are seeing in this picture is Anand kumar, a mathematician from Patna,
Bihar, India. He developed an indomitable affection and love towards
mathematics and possesses exceptional mathematical abilities. His role model is
great Indian mathematician “Ramanujan”. During graduation, He submitted papers
on Number Theory, which were published in Mathematical Spectrum and The
Mathematical Gazette. He worked hard and dreamed of getting into one of the
world’s best university “Cambridge”. And one day he got it, admission to
Cambridge.
But…
Very soon
he realized that his father cannot afford his education at Cambridge. He and his
father searched helplessly for a sponsor all over India but nobody came up. And
one day his family’s only breadwinner: his father died and his last hope of
getting good education diminished. He gave up the dream of Cambridge and came
back to his home in Patna, Bihar.
He would
work on Mathematics during day time and would sell papads in evenings with his
mother, who had started a small business from home, to support her family. He
also tutored students in maths to earn extra money. Since Patna University
library did not have foreign journals, for his own study, he would travel every
weekend on a six-hour train journey to Varanasi, where his younger brother,
learning violin under N. Rajam, had a hostel room. Thus he would spend Saturday
and Sunday at the Central Library, BHU and return to Patna on Monday morning.
He rented
a classroom for Rs 500 a month, and began his own institute, the Ramanujam
School of Mathematics (RSM). Within the space of year, his class grew from two
students to thirty-six, and after three years there were almost 500 students
enrolled. Then in early 2000, when a poor student came to him seeking coaching
for IIT-JEE, who couldn’t afford the annual admission fee due to poverty, Kumar
was motivated to start the Super 30 program in 2003, for which he is now
well-known.
Every year
in August, since 2003, the Ramanujan School of Mathematics, now a trust, holds
a competitive test to select 30 students for the ‘Super 30’ scheme. About 4,000
to 5,000 students appear at the test, and eventually he takes thirty
intelligent students from economically backward sections which included
beggars, hawkers, and auto-driver’s children, tutors them, and provides study
materials and lodging for a year. He prepares them for the Joint Entrance
Examination for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). His mother, Jayanti
Devi, cooks for the students, and his brother Pranav Kumar takes care of the
management. Out of 270 students he tutored from 2002-2011 236 students have
made an admission to IIT. All of them came so poor background that their
parents were Hawkers, Auto-drivers, laborer etc. During 2003-2009, 182 students
out of 210 have made it to the IITs.
In 2010,
all the students of Super 30 cleared IIT JEE entrance making it a three in a
row for the institution.
Anand
Kumar has no financial support for Super 30 from any government as well as
private agencies, and manages on the tuition fee he earns from the Ramanujam
Institute. After the success of Super 30 and its growing popularity, he got
many offers from the private – both national and international companies – as well as the government for
financial help, but he always refused it. He wanted to sustain Super 30 through
his own efforts. After three consecutive 30/30 results in 2008-2010, in 2011,
24 of the 30 students cleared IIT JEE.
Anand’s
work is now well received from all over the world:
USA’s
president Obama read about Anand in TIME magazine and sent a special envoy to
check the work done by him and offered all the assistance and Anand never
accepts help irrespective of helper. Discovery Channel broadcast a
one-hour-long program on Super 30, and half a page has been devoted to Kumar in
The New York Times. Actress and ex-Miss Japan Norika Fujiwara visited Patna to
make a documentary on Anand’s initiatives. Kumar has been featured in
programmes by the BBC. He has spoken about his experiences at Indian Institute
of Management Ahmedabad. Kumar is in the Limca Book of Records (2009) for his
contribution in helping poor students crack IIT-JEE by providing them free
coaching. Time Magazine has selected mathematician Anand Kumar’s school – Super 30 – in the list of Best of Asia 2010. Anand
Kumar was awarded the S. Ramanujan Award for 2010 by the Institute for Research
and Documentation in Social Sciences (IRDS) in July 2010.
Super 30
received praise from United States President Barack Obama’s special envoy
Rashad Hussain, who termed it the “best” institute in the country. Newsweek
Magazine has taken note of the initiative of mathematician Anand Kumar’s Super
30 and included his school in the list of four most innovative schools in the
world. Anand Kumar has been awarded by top award of Bihar government “Maulana
Abdul Kalam Azad Shiksha Puraskar” November 2010. He was awarded the Prof
Yashwantrao Kelkar Yuva Puraskar 2010 by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad
(ABVP) in Bangalore. In April 2011, Anand Kumar was selected by Europe’s
magazine Focus as “one of the global personalities who have the ability to
shape exceptionally talented people.
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