Prof. Manindra Agrawal was born on 20th May 1966 at Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh. He received his B.Tech. and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1986 and 1991, respectively. He later worked as a fellow at the School of Mathematics, SPIC Science Foundation, Chennai from 1993 to 1995, and a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Ulm, Germany, from 1995 to 1996. In 1996, he joined as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur. In 2003, he was appointed as the N. Rama Rao Chair Professor. From 2003-2004, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.
Prof. Agrawal has made significant contributions to the theory of efficient reactions between computational problems, which are a part of the program studying the well-known "P vs NP" question in mathematics/ computer science. He co-created the AKS primality test with Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena for which he and his co-authors won the 2006 Fulkerson Prize and the 2006 Godel Prize. He was also awarded the Clay Research Award for this work in 2002. The test is the first unconditional deterministic algorithm to test an n-digit number for primality in a time that has been proven to be polynomial in n. He designed private-key encryption algorithms for Indian Navy and Air Force. These algorithms are being used by the armed forces to secure their communications.
In September 2008, he was chosen for the first Infosys Mathematics Prize for outstanding contributions in the broad field of mathematics. In 2013, he was honored with Padma Shri..
