The genesis of this Division can be traced to the Research and Training School of the Institute, known worldwide as the RTS. The RTS made a significant impact on the international scene in statistics and mathematics during the fifties and sixties.

In 1976, the Institute was reorganised into several Divisions. Theoretical Statistics and Mathematics was, and still is, the largest of the Divisions. Initially, the Division had two units -- one in Kolkata and the other in Delhi; later the Bangalore Unit was added. Keeping the RTS legacy in mind, the Division can rightfully claim a large number of Indian statisticians and mathematicians around the world to be its alumni.

The research activities of the Kolkata unit are spread over the disciplines of Statistics, Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. All faculty members are full time employees and, apart from pursuing their individual research careers, they also participate in the inter-disciplinary activities of the Institute. Several of them are involved in externally funded projects. The unit routinely hosts a large number of distinguished academics from India and abroad as visitors. It also encourages young researchers to spend time in the unit as visitors.

The faculty enthusiastically participates in the teaching of courses, specially in the degree courses B.Stat, M.Stat, M.Math, and in other training programmes of the Institute. The unit hosts regular seminars, conferences, workshops, summer and winter courses. There are regular training programmes for its Research Fellows.

It maintains close academic contact with universities and other teaching and research institutions in the country. The workshops or the summer courses are usually meant for students and faculty members from universities and colleges. Faculty of the unit is also involved in guiding summer projects for students from outside the Institute. They render assistance to national bodies such as the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, National Board for Higher Mathematics, NSSO, CSIR, UGC and DST in various ways.

Research Interests

SMUK focuses on research in Mathematics, Probability and Theoretical Statistics. The unit currently has 27 faculty members, 5 of them are Bhatnagar awardees. In Statistics the main focus are in: Statistical Study of Agreement, Statistical Inference, Statistical Study of Surveillance, Statistical Study of Apportionment Index, Statistical Modeling of Dyadic Interactions, Parametric and non-parametric classification, and Study of Robust Estimators. Non-parametric statistics, Rates of convergence in the Central Limit Theorem (CLT), Law of iterated logarithms (LIL) and Characterization theorems, High dimensional time series. In Probability Theory, the main focus of research are: Stochastic Processes, Limit Theorems, Rates of Convergence and Expansions, Stochastic Integrals, Stochastic Differential Equations, Stability of stochastic dynamical systems, and Two-time scale. Random Walks, Martingale Theory and Stochastic Calculus, Stochastic approximation, Markov Chain Simulation, Random Continued Fractions, Bernoulli Convolutions and Iterated Function Systems, Large-dimensional Random Matrices, Record values, Extreme values, Moral hazard problems in economics, Resampling plans, Time series. and Kernel density estimates, Urn Model Asymptotics, free probability analogue of subexponential distribution, Asymptotics of Randomly weighted sum, Non-commutative probability, Diffusion approximations, Inference in panel data under cross-sectional dependence, Stochastic modelling of political business cycle Stochastic Modelling of financial crisis through trade and capital inflow, High dimensional random matrices and its applications, Free probability. In mathematics the main topics of research are: Noncommutative geometry: Levi civita connections, Hopf algebroid and their actions on noncommutative spaces, quantum symmetry, Commutative Algebra, Affine Algebraic Geometry, History of Mathematics, Analytic Number Theory, Circle method, Analytic theory of L- functions, Differential Geometry, non-holonimic distributions of co-rank greater than 1, Harmonic analysis on harmonic manifolds, Riemann surfaces, Rigidity problems for negatively curved manifolds, Motivic Homotopy Theory.