Bengaluru, Jan 11 (PTI) Starting this year, winners of the Infosys Prize from outside India will be required to spend a month at Indian institutions of their choice as part of the new Infosys Prize Residency programme, said Kris Gopalakrishnan, President of the Infosys Science Foundation, at the 2024 award ceremony held on Saturday in Bengaluru.

In its 16th year, the prize has also changed the eligibility criteria and is now recognizing researchers under the age of 40, underscoring the importance of early recognition for exceptional talent, he added.

"Recognising early-career talent is crucial for driving innovation and inspiring the next generation to address the challenges of tomorrow. This year’s laureates have demonstrated exceptional dedication and ingenuity, contributing solutions to critical global challenges. Their achievements highlight the strength of the scientific ecosystem and reaffirm our belief that science is on the right path toward creating a better, more sustainable future," he added.

Two women scientists were among the six winners of the Infosys Prize 2024, which was instituted by the ISF in 2009.

The awards were presented by Professor Peter Sarnak, Gopal Prasad Professor of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University.

"Over the years, I have witnessed firsthand the immense talent and impact of Indian mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists. As is clear from the descriptions of this year’s prize winners, this tradition extends across all these disciplines and to all of the 2024 prize winners," said Professor Sarnak.

Sarnak was introduced by Narayana Murthy, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Infosys.

The two women who were awarded this year are Neena Gupta for Mathematical Sciences and Vedika Khemani for Physical Sciences.

Gupta, a Professor in the Theoretical Statistics and Mathematics Unit at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, was awarded for her work on the Zariski Cancellation Problem, a fundamental problem in algebraic geometry first posed in 1949 by Oscar Zariski, one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry.

She received the prize for proving the striking result that Asanuma’s three-dimensional affine variety yields a negative answer to Zariski’s original Cancellation Problem in positive characteristic.

Khemani, an Associate Professor in the Physics Department at Stanford University, was recognized for her wide-ranging and groundbreaking contributions to theoretical and experimental non-equilibrium quantum matter, most notably the discovery of time crystals.

Arun Chandrasekhar, a Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University, won the Economics Prize for his contribution to the study of social and economic networks, using innovative datasets and drawing on theoretical methods from machine learning and computer science.

The Engineering and Computer Science Prize was awarded to Shyam Gollakota, a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, for his research in societally relevant areas such as smartphone-based affordable healthcare tools for low- and middle-income countries, battery-free computing and communication, and augmentation of human auditory sensing with artificial intelligence.

The Infosys Prize 2024 in Humanities and Social Sciences was awarded to Mahmood Kooria, a Lecturer in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, for his seminal contributions to the study of maritime Islam from a global perspective, with particular focus on Kerala in the pre-modern and early modern eras.

The Life Sciences Prize was awarded to Siddhesh Kamat, an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, for his discoveries concerning bioactive lipids and their receptors, and their metabolic and signalling pathways.

The winners were chosen by a jury panel. The prize for each category comprises a gold medal, a citation, and a prize purse of USD 100,000.

Nandan Nilekani and Mohandas Pai were among the dignitaries present at the award ceremony. PTI JR SSK ROH