Śankaran Ramesh

@Kaju_Nut Bohr also had a free lifetime supply of beer from Carlsberg Brewery of Denmark (gifted after he won the Nobel prize)

When physicist Niels Bohr heard the news of his assistant Rosenfeld's engagement, he remarked: ‘It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.’

Next in who after the Ramanujan Series? He is the reason we can find a needle in the digital haystack of the world. Meet Dr. Rajeev Motwani (1962-2009), the Ghost who built the logic of the modern world. A boy from Jammu who went to IIT Kanpur & ended up teaching 2 kids at Stanford how to organize the internet. W/o him, there is no Google. W/o him, the web would be a chaotic library with no index. He was the master of Randomized Algorithms, the man who proved that sometimes, a bit of chance is the fastest way to the truth. He won the Nobel of his field & mentored the titans of Silicon Valley, yet he remains an invisible legend in his homeland. He is the architect of the digital oracle, the man who taught the world how to search. Born in 1962 in Jammu, Rajeev grew up in a household defined by the discipline of the Indian Army. As a child, he famously wanted to be a librarian because he loved books so much. He eventually realized that mathematics was the ultimate indexing system for the universe. He belonged to the legendary Class of 1983 at IIT Kanpur. This was a Silo of intense competition that refined his ability to solve problems with extreme speed & elegance. He moved to the US & earned his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1988, diving into the deep waters of theoretical computer science. Before Motwani, most computer scientists tried to find perfect answers. Motwani realized that for massive amounts of data, perfection is too slow. He proved that by introducing a small, controlled amount of randomness into an algorithm, we could solve complex problems millions of times faster than traditional methods. In 1995, he co-authored Randomized Algorithms. It is not just a textbook; it is the fundamental blueprint for modern computing. Every time a large system (like a global bank/a social network) processes data, it likely uses a Motwani-style randomized check. In the mid-90s, at Stanford University, Motwani encountered 2 students: Larry Page & Sergey Brin. They had a rough idea for a search engine. Motwani provided the mathematical rigor. He helped them formulate PageRank, the algorithm that ranks web pages by their importance based on link structure. He was not just a mentor; he was an early advisor & investor. He was the Ghost in the room when Google was born in a garage. Beyond Google, he was a foundational advisor to PayPal, Airbnb, & Twitter. He saw the Pattern of Success in startups before they even had a name. In 2001, he won the highest honor in theoretical computer science (The Gödel Prize) for his work on the PCP Theorem (a massive breakthrough in how we verify proofs). In 2009, at the age of 47, he passed away in a tragic accident at his home in California. Silicon Valley went into a state of deep mourning. Sergey Brin wrote a heartbreaking tribute titled "Rajeev Motwani, my friend & teacher." Yet, in India, his name did not make the front pages. He remains a Ghost in the country that produced him. He is the Ghost of the Algorithm. Like Ramanujan, he saw the beauty in the approximated truth. He realized that the world is too big to be solved by simple, rigid lines, so he taught machines how to use probability to find the truth. Key Work: theory.stanford.edu/~rajeev/papers…

Work hard, learn by doing and do something you love. On International Students' Day, our 2017 physics laureates share their advice for young researchers. #studentsday

🧪⚛️ There are a couple of fun, conversational preprints this week on the arXiv - one about the mysterious connection between structural chirality and electron spin; and a condensed matter theory take on ways to think about quantum gravity. nanoscale.blogspot.com/2025/10/intere…

@schmidtim Haha! Copper water bottles are a common thing in Indian households! supposed to be anti-bacterial, hence the marketability of “copper-water”

I hope not

How often do you think about Indian Bronze Age ships with square-shaped sails? 😍

It’s time for the summer “vacation”

Long lasting good 'vibes'! We followed coherent nuclear motion of gold-bromine bonds in this fascinating new lead-free perovskite material, leading to a slow (~20 ps) formation of a polaronic state. doi.org/10.1002/adom.2… #perovskite #coherent #phonon #polaron #ultrafast

Excited to share our 2.5-year work with the Marom group at @CarnegieMellon! Together, we expanded the Ogre library into an algorithm that lets you predict epitaxial matches between ionic materials (e.g. CsPbBr₃ #perovskite) ON A LAPTOP! @acsnano @IITalk pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

⚡We are hiring!⚡ Interested in working with synthetic chemistry, spectroscopy and photoactive transition metal complexes? PhD positions (deadline Nov 22nd): lnkd.in/dF5qTBQn Postdoc position (deadline Dec 1st): lnkd.in/dBawXB9w RT appreciated😁@Chemjobber

@KrishanuSays @TrinityOxford @oxengsci Congratulations, Krishanu!

Thrilled to share that I will be joining @TrinityOxford as a Stipendiary Lecturer in Engineering Science from October 2024. Really looking forward to teaching @oxengsci undergraduate students and interacting with the academic community in the college.

👋Hi folks, we are seeking a post-doctoral researcher to study chemistry, spectroscopy, and the collective properties of metal halide perovskite nanomaterials. Here is the link to the position description (application deadline August 20): lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jo…

@amitsurg @bookingcom Had similar experience, only got saved bcos I put off paying until later, by then @bookingcom informed it as phishing. Its Ridiculous. For the future, I suggest to check the .com URL carefully, u can identify the phish. "booking.hotel2852" instead of "booking" in clearly fraud

This is a cautionary post - do not book on @bookingcom as their servers and hotel accounts are compromised, and they know about it but are sleeping on it. Is their team in on the scam? That is a matter which the police will now look into.

My daughter was defrauded on @bookingcom on 16th Jan while blocking a hotel room for a friend. She got a notification from the hotel through the app, asking for card confirmation which is a usual practice on the app. On giving the card details, Rs. 94693 was instantly swiped.

Special visitor at Chemical Physics! Lucky to host Alain Aspect, @NobelPrize 2022. Glad to share our exciting work with #Entangled photons! @lunduniversity @wacqt_sweden

@RamKandada @wfuphysics @WakeForest Congrats!

Excited to announce that our QuantumUFOs group has received the NSF CAREER award. We will develop quantum optical methods to explore nonlinear dynamics of exciton polarons in materials, and use optics to promote STEM education @wfuphysics @WakeForest nsf.gov/awardsearch/sh…

@KGT_Lab @vishnuek_ @HofkensLab @tvmiiser @Chemie_iisertvm Congrats 🥳 @vishnuek_

A big round of applause for Dr. @vishnuek_ 👏on a stellar thesis defense! Your commitment and expertise have truly shone through. Grateful for the valuable insights shared by our external examiner, Prof. Johan Hofkens. @HofkensLab @tvmiiser @Chemie_iisertvm

Explore the dynamic capabilities of 2D Electronic Spectroscopy optimized for layered halide perovskites with spectrally tunable excitonic transitions #2DES #Perovskite @SumLab_NTU @sankaranrameshw @GeoFong @appchem_tt ⤵️ doi.org/10.1021/acspho…

@vikasnavaratna Dragonfruit.

What, to you, are some foods that taste much different than they sound? Be it in a good way or bad. For example an alligator, I thought it'd be weird, but I was completely wrong. Tasted really good. Then, you've turnips. Cute name & appearance, but tastes like farts.

This weeks PrimeView highlights the analysis of two-dimensional electronic data. Free to download for a week: go.nature.com/47rf6Vy

Wow! Linguistics for Millennials 🤩 @indiainpixels Wow!