Anil Gupta, Subir Kumar Banerjee and Pravin Varaiya will receive the much-sought-after fellowships this October.
WASHINGTON, DC: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected three Indian-origin academics as fellows, thus putting them in the same class as George Washington, Albert Einstein, Jawaharlal Nehru and Winston Churchill.
Anil Gupta, professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science, Subir Kumar Banerjee of the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Rock Magnetism, and Pravin Varaiya, who teaches computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, will receive the much-sought-after fellowships this October.
“I was completely taken by surprise,” said Gupta. “I was overjoyed after I assured myself that it was not some belated April 1 joke.”
Banerjee was driving his SUV late at night through the Mexican countryside to collect sample sediments from a lake when his wife called to break the news.
“My family is delighted. Of course, a party is in the offing,” he said.
Gupta’s studies in philosophy include logic, language, and epistemology. He acquired his PhD in 1977 at the same university where he is teaching now. He took up philosophy because he feels it “concerns the most fundamental problems about the nature of reality and our knowledge of it. Any person who genuinely contributes to a solution, or even to our understanding, of these problems is rightly considered a great thinker. For example, Plato, Hume and Einstein.” But, he said: “It is easy to wonder whether one’s work has any value in philosophy. The election made me feel that perhaps my work is not entirely worthless.”
Banerjee, too, said he felt humbled. In the last two years, he has been conferred a special award from the American Geophysical Union and a medal from the European Geosciences Union. “These had a direct and more understandable meaning for me, even though this latest honour is the most prestigious in a general sense.”
Varaiya, who turned 65 last month (and was not available for an interview), had an entire symposium hosted in his honour on his birthday, and about 100 scientists turned up.
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