By Arun Kumar (19:14)
Washington, Nov 21 (IANS) US President Barack Obama
awarded the National Medal of Science to Indian American scientist
Thomas Kailath for his transformative contribution to science and
technology.
Kerala-born Stanford University Professor Kailath,
79, received the medal along with 18 of America's top thinkers,
discoverers, and innovators at a ceremony in the East Room of the White
House Thursday.
Marvelling both at the amount of brainpower
packed into the room and the magnitude of the laureates' achievements,
Obama said: "The results of the work of the people we honour today have
transformed our world."
"Kailath came to this country from India
at the age of 22, with a research assistantship that took him to MIT,
and then Stanford, where he made critical contributions in information
theory and statistics, and mentored more than 100 scholars along the
way," he noted.
Citing Kailath's remarks that "Scientists are
intrinsically hopeful and believe in grand answers, and that if we work
hard enough we can find some of them in our lifetime", the president
said: "And that's a good phrase -- 'intrinsically hopeful'."
"I'm
intrinsically hopeful," he said amidst laughter and applause. "That's
who I am. That's who we are as a people, as Americans, as a nation.
We've had to fight to make stories like the ones here in this room not
only possible, but sometimes likely."
Kailath was honoured for
"transformative contributions to the fields of information and system
science, for distinctive and sustained mentoring of young scholars, and
for translation of scientific ideas into entrepreneurial ventures that
have had a significant impact on industry."
Awarded annually, the
National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and
Innovation are America's highest honours for achievement and leadership
in advancing the fields of science and technology.
Born in 1935
to a Malayalam-speaking Syrian Christian family, Kailath is also a
recipient of the Padma Bhushan, one of India's high civilian awards,
and is a member of major science and engineering academies in India.
He
received his BE (telecom) degree from the College of Engineering, Pune,
before getting his SM and ScD degrees in electrical engineering from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He then worked at the
Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, California, before joining Stanford
University as associate professor of electrical engineering in 1963.
Kailath's
research and teaching at Stanford have ranged over several fields of
engineering and mathematics, with a different focus roughly every
decade, according to his profile on the university website.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)