The International Mathematics Conference in Hyderabad comes to an end today. The global conference couldn’t have come to India at a more appropriate time, what with the dwindling interest in the subject among school and college goers.

The buzz has been infectious. From the youngest member — 12-year-old Kaavya Jayram, who presented a paper on integer partitioning at the satellite event International Congress of Women Mathematicians to one of the oldest — 85-year-old Louis Nirenberg from New York’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and recipeint of the new Chern Prize ($250,000) — everyone at the nine-day event helped sprinkle some gold dust over glamour-starved mathematics.

Glamour also came in the form of World Chess champion Viswanathan Anand who simultaneously took on 35 mathematicians and 5 IT professionals, drawing his game with one and pipping the rest of the number crunchers.

The Fields Medals — considered equivalent to the Nobel Prize — were an instant booster for young mathematicians of this country, a good number of whom attended the event organised by the University of Hyderabad. The organisers attempt to keep numebrs alive has gone down very well with most attending universities and the government pledging support to programmes that would help the subject become popular once more.

After the fest, they just need to keep the tempo right and the gold dust in place.

A study on research papers written by Indian researchers over 27 years (1981-2008) has revealed interesting results.

The good news first: India’s share of collaborative papers and the relative number of citations have both increased in the last few years. The bad news: India ranks seventh in terms of total output of papers among the group of countries surveyed (UK, USA, Germany, China, Japan, South Korea, France, Brazil, India and Australia). The country ranks 10th in terms of citation impact. Also, India has a relatively low share of global research publications.

The study commissioned by Research Councils, UK and conducted by a Thomson Reuters unit collates bibliometric data on India’s research output and international collaboration.

Across disciplines, India collaborates the most with USA followed by Germany and the UK. Physical sciences remain the strongest area of Indo-UK collaboration. Medical, health and biological sciences also produce a substantial volume of highly-cited research.

While in UK the Imperial College of London, Manchester University and Cambridge University remain the hotbed of UK-India co-authorship; In India, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Delhi University and Panjab University are the top three collaborative research hubs followed by the Indian Institute of Science and Indian Association for Cultivation of Science.

The study provides ample scope for policy makers and research collborators to identify emerging research areas, collaborative opportunities and potential sources of funding. On an optimistic note, the study infers that though the number of research papers written by Indian authors is relatively low in international terms, India’s research activity is growing and is likely to become increasingly important to the global research community. The low number of citations implies there are opportunities for high standard collaboration. It also leaves space for further analysis considering that the data is till 2008, after which the science funding in India has risen by 17 per cent.