Summer School for Women in Mathematics and Statistics 2018 : Follow up

Funded by Indian Statistical Institute.

The summer school is a follow up of the Summer School for Women in Mathematics and Statistics 2018.




  • Basic Information

  • Duration of School: May 27th to July 19th, 2019.
  • Organisers: Anita Naolekar and Siva Athreya.
  • Venue:8th Mile, Mysore road, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore 560059.
  • About : In this follow up we intend to work with students on a one-one basis and help them gain depthful, broader exposure to mathematics and statistics at the second year undergraduate level.
  • Expectation : Each student will be given problems/reading tasks daily and is expected to work independently to solve them and submit written solutions.
  • Support: Each selected student will be provided 3T sleeper class fare from home to Bangalore and local accommodation for the duration of the school.


  • Application Process

  • Eligibility : Any student who was selected for the Summer School for Women in Mathematics and Statistics 2018 is eligible to apply.
  • Participation: Each student is expected to spend a minimum of 4 weeks and a maximum of 8 weeks.
  • Deadline: March 31st, 2019.
  • Form: Please print the form available here.Fill in the form and follow the instructions given.

  • School Format:

  • At Home: May 27th to June 1, 2019. [Non-Residential] Individual Worksheet solving.
  • At ISI-Bangalore: June 3rd to June 21st, 2019. [Residential] Based on Application and the solutions to worksheet 1, a school catering to individual needs will be designed. The school will involve in-class group worksheets, assignments, and tests. All participants have to be on campus in this period.
  • At Home: June 21st to July 19th 2019. [Non-Residential] Based on the entire process above, a project may be assigned that a student can work on. The project may end in one of the two reports:-- a) an expository write up, which we will post on the school website OR b) on a topic which will help the student for a future course that they have an interest to enroll in.



  • Assignments given since SWMS2018


  • Week 1: May 27th - June 1st




Week 2 (June3- June 8, 2019) :


  • June 6th, 2019






Week 3 (June 10- June 15, 2019) :




Week 4 (June 17- June 21, 2019) :





  • Short Courses at Summer School

  • Rukmini Dey: June 10th, 11th, 12th.[11:30am-1pm]
    • Title: Introduction to minimal surfaces
    • Abstract: On the first class I will review some material from theory of surfaces. Second class I will derive the Weirestrass-Enneper representation of minimal surfaces. Next class I will talk about the Bjorling problem and Schwartz's solution to it.
  • Parthanil Roy: June, 10th, 12th, and 14th.[2:00-3:30pm]
    • Title: Topics in discrete probability
    • Abstract: This short course will cover various discrete probability models ranging from Polya's urn scheme to card shuffling. The main theme would be to compute expectation and variance of certain discrete random variables coming out of these models. Examples (and exercises) will be discussed in details.
    • Notes: Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3, Beyond Lectures

  • Short Courses at Summer School

  • Pooja Singla: June 13th, 14th and 17th. [11:30am-1pm]
    • Title: Linear Algebra
    • Abstract:
      Lecture 1: linear transformations, matrices, vector spaces,basis, dimension and rank nullity thm
      Lecture 2: eigen values, eigen vectors, eigen spaces, Cayley Hamilton (may not do full proof) but mention few applications
      Lecture 3: Jordan canonical form (here again plan is to give shortest proof and emphasize more on the statement and it’s few applications).

  • Short Courses at Summer School

  • Koushik Ramachandran : June 18th, 19th, and 20th. [9:30am-11am]
    • Title: Linear algebraic methods in extremal combinatorics
    • Abstract:

      In these lectures we shall see how one can use linear algebra to count certain combinatorial quantities. The student may be familiar from basic graph theory that to each graph is associated its adjacency matrix P, and to count the number of paths of length k between two vertices i and j, we simply read off the ijth entry of P^k.

      While this is a simplistic model, we shall see that it contains the basic idea of the method- associate a linear algebraic object (matrices, vector spaces etc) to the combinatorial quantity and derive bounds by linear algebra (rank, linear indepenfence etc). We will familiarize ourselves with this method by studying concrete examples such as constructive Ramsey theory, two distance sets, and other combinatorial objects arising in geometry. A basic familiarity with linear algebra (rank, linear independence etc) is the only prerequisite.




Summer Reading



Last modified: July 5th 2019