Rakhi Pratihar
the artist
Inria & LIX, École Polytechnique, France
Rakhi Pratihar is a mathematician from India who works on the mathematical aspects of error-correcting codes in digital communication and cryptography, using techniques from algebra, combinatorics, finite geometry and algorithmic.
the artwork
অসাধ্য
Bengali - Intractable - 2025 - Digital art using LaTex typesetting system
2 days - 13 hours - 0 minutes
audio commentary
A fundamental problem in mathematics and computer science is the sphere packing problem and it relates to the decoding problem of a code, a subspace of a finite dimensional vector space. If we represent the vectors in the code as green dots, the decoding problem ask to return the closest green dot from any random vector, represented as red dot, in the ambient space. Even after 70 years of research, decoding a linear code without any “peculiar” structure remained an intractable problem. My research interest is to construct structured codes in matrix space and design their decoding algorithms.
Rakhi Pratihar
mathematics in Indian culture
The Vedic Indians used to perform fire rituals involving constructions of fireplaces and altars of varieties of geometric shapes. Śulvasūtras are manuals of those fire rituals in the Vedic culture, going back to at least 1500 BCE, containing the geometric ideas for the explicit constructions. The picture is a replica of a falcon-shaped alter (or vedi in Sanskrit) using squares and trapezium, originally excavated from Uttarkashi of approximately 150 BCE. These are part of the Agnicanaya ritual still performed in Kerala, a district of Southern India.