- Lived:
- born 15 July 1956, Calcutta (Kolkata) — living, as of September 2026; the life has run Calcutta → America for training (Stony Brook, Fermilab, SLAC) → home for good in 1988: Bombay (TIFR), then twenty-six years in Allahabad (Prayagraj), now Bengaluru (ICTS)
- Field:
- theoretical physics — string theory; the deep mathematical structure of matter, forces and gravity
- The Big Idea:
- In 1994 he produced hard evidence that a theory of physics at impossibly strong coupling can be exactly another theory at weak coupling — the "strong–weak duality" that revealed the five rival string theories to be one theory seen from five sides, and set off the second superstring revolution. He did it from India, on purpose.
- In their words:
- "There are no excuses for theoretical physicists not to perform and deliver." (his remark to the BBC after winning the world's richest science prize, 2012 — his point being that theory needs no expensive machines; as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- While India debated its brain drain, one of the greatest theoretical physicists alive turned down the world's famous institutes, worked for a quarter of a century from a modest institute in Allahabad, and forced the frontier of physics to come to him.