Professor Nalini Joshi AO, who is an Australian of Indian descent, has become the first Australian to ever be elected as the Vice-President of the International Mathematical Union (IMU). Professor Joshi is a Georgina Sweet Australian Laureate Fellow in mathematics at the University of Sydney.
Professor Joshi who was born in Burma obtained her PhD from Princeton University and has held the Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Sydney since 2002. She was elected a fellow at the Australian Academy of Science in March 2008. She has been on the National Committee for Mathematical Sciences since 2010. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales and was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2016.
Professor Joshi told SBS Hindi that she felt quite humbled to be first nominated and then be elected the Vice-President of IMU.
"It was a really big moment for me. I have just followed a path that I was really really obsessed with and very interested in since my teenage years. I have been trying to understand and answer questions that I found obsessively fascinating. It has led me more and more into deeper and deeper mathematics."
Professor Joshi feels that it is important to keep following one's passion but it's also important to make sure that you are taking on board any feedback you might get from others and that you also accept your shortcomings along the way.
"I have just been following that pathway, trying to listen and be open to others and accept myself, and at the same time check the evidence that what I am seeing is correct as I went along and its just gotten me to where I am now."
According to Professor Joshi, Mathematics is as human as music and that is why it is something that anyone can do at any time in their lives.
"It's something that anybody can take up no matter how old you are. I often meet people who have become high powered lawyers or other professionals and they tell me that they have taken up mathematics again and that they are actually reading linear algebra before going to bed as part of their stimulus for their brain and enjoyment."
"Mathematics is essential for every part of science, you can't do science without knowledge of mathematics because mathematics is the language of science", says Professor Joshi. "There are, for example, models of the way disease spreads in the body or how disease spreads throughout a population in an epidemic. It's only mathematics that enables us to understand exactly, for example, what the vaccination rate should be in a population so that we don’t have further epidemics in the future. Without mathematics, we would not have been able to work those out."
