Professor Santosh Vempala
Associate professor of mathematics, MIT

A native of Visakhapatnam, Vempala graduated from IIT-New Delhi and joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1993, and MIT in 1997. Between 1998 and 1999, he was a Miller Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley.

Vempala and his students have set up an Internet search engine, Eigencluster, that could rival Google. As of now, Eigencluster is used for demonstration, and finds results in clusters: ie, if you type a word with more than one meaning, it throws up a cluster of web sites related to all the meanings.

"Somebody may make use of it (the search engine) for commercial purposes. But I have no inclination for it," Vempala says. "I am interested in studying basic questions in geometry from an algorithmic perspective. Traditionally, mathematicians have been content with the 'knowledge of existence' of a solution -- for example, the function has a fixed point -- and are not worried about finding one."

Vempala recently published The Random Projection Method. He is also editor, Theory of Computing.

He is married to Rosa Arriaga, assistant professor of psychology at Southern New Hampshire University; the couple has a three-month-old daughter, Sofia Anandi.

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