Gaudiya Warriors 𖤓

When the Naxalite unrest shut down his classrooms in 1970, he studied on his own for the board exams. He wrote the exam in Bengali When he entered Presidency College for his BSc, he had to manually translate scientific terms from Bengali to English during exams. His name is Ashoke Sen. One of the greatest Indian physicists alive says he spends 90% of his time stuck with no progress. Not as a young researcher. Even Now. After receiving the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics carrying a $3 million cash reward, three times the amount of a Nobel Prize. He grew up in Kolkata, the son of a college physics teacher. Political unrest delayed Calcutta University exams, causing students to lose a full academic year. To avoid losing two more years during his MSc, Sen left Kolkata for @IITKanpur When it came time to apply abroad for a PhD, he applied to exactly two universities. Not out of strategy. They were the only two he could afford, the ones that didn’t demand an application fee up front. One was Stony Brook University. He got in. After research stints at Fermilab and Stanford, he turned down permanent US offers and returned to India in 1988. He chose to work out of a quiet research institute in Prayagraj rather than a flashy global university hub. In 1994, he proposed a duality in string theory that helped set off a revolution in the field, work that reshaped how physicists understood their own subject. In 2012, he won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The next morning, he donated a substantial part of the $3 million prize money, hopped on his bicycle, and rode to his humble office in Prayagraj to resume solving equations. It amazes me how every great physicist has one thing in common - Simplicity