Manil Suri

Manil Suri is an Indian-American mathematician and novelist, born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1959. He studied at the University of Bombay and then went to the United States, where he took a doctorate in mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University in 1983 and joined the mathematics faculty of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he became a distinguished university professor. His mathematical research has been in the field of finite elements, a family of numerical methods for solving differential equations. Alongside that career he wrote a trilogy of novels named for Hindu gods, The Death of Vishnu, The Age of Shiva and The City of Devi, the first of which was long-listed for the 2001 Booker Prize. He has also written a popular book on mathematics, The Big Bang of Numbers, published in 2022, and is known for arguing that mathematics and the humanities belong together.