How did you decide your field of interest?

 As an undergrad, I chose to study maths and computing at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur because I liked maths much more than the other subjects I had studied so far, and I had already done some basic level of programming in C++. In my first year or so I started

understanding what maths really was by reading various books and talking to some of my batchmates who knew a lot more than I did because of their olympiad background. I found it absolutely fascinating! And so I read several books in diverse areas of maths, including some books on history of maths. Over the years, I did summer projects in graph algorithms (at ISI Calcutta), Galois theory (at TIFR Mumbai), algebraic coding theory (at Panjab University), and finite geometry (at ISI Bangalore). It was the summer project in finite geometry under Prof. Bhaskar Bagchi that had the biggest impact on me.

This area had connections with group theory, combinatorics, graph theory and linear algebra, which are all the areas I had enjoyed learning till then. Prof. Bagchi taught me about projective planes, strongly regular graphs, permutation groups, combinatorial designs, and how all of these mathematical objects interact with each other. We proved uniqueness of some small finite projective planes, studied Golay codes and Witt designs, and he showed me how mathematical research is done. I started my math blog after this internship, and in fact decided to go for a PhD in maths as a result of this experience.

At the end of this internship with Prof. Bagchi I asked him about places, besides ISI Bangalore, where they do research in this area. One of the main ones that he told me about was the Incidence Geometry Research Group at University of Ghent. And so I thought I’ll apply to them for a PhD. I was also broadly interested in combinatorics, algebraic coding theory and graph theory, and so I applied to some other places as well. But finally I decided to go for Ghent, where my current supervisor offered me a position, because of several reasons that I talk about here.

Currently my field of interests consists of incidence geometry, spectral graph theory, additive/algebraic/extremal combinatorics, and polynomial methods. I “specialize” in some of them, while I am learning more and more about the others.