Between 1995 and 2001 the Foundation ran a project sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, aimed at showing the applicability of Mathematics in solving real life problems. The motive was to study important aspects of mathematics and their applications in fields connected with daily life, and to present them to a non-professional audience.

The project made extensive use of computers, especially in the form of interactive programs that allow the viewer the opportunity to work his own way through some of the arguments. It made it possible for the layperson with a modest background in mathematics to understand and appreciate the role, played by mathematics in our everyday lives and in disciplines such as Economics, Physics and Computer Science. It enabled faculty and students to engage in interesting applications- oriented research work, which is extremely relevant in industry and in the corporate sector. The project helped us to spot and nurture enormous talent in related areas.

We have exhibited this work at the annual meetings of the Indian Science Congress held at Calcutta (1995), Delhi (1996), Hyderabad (1998), Chennai (1999) and at IARI, Delhi (2001) and at a science fair held in IIT (Delhi) in 2000.

Under this project we looked at several areas of applied mathematics. Some of the areas looked at were:

RSA and other public (as well as private) key cryptosystems

Error-correcting codes

Image recognition

The Radon transform and its use in computer-aided tomography

The pricing of futures and options and the Black-Scholes theorem

Differential equations and the acoustics of Indian drums and of Horns

Chaos

Fourier transforms and radio astronomy

Applications of graph theory

The mathematics behind computer graphics

Knot Theory and DNA

Theory of auctions

The Transportation Problem

The Knapsack Problem

Block designs and other combinatorial designs

Acoustics of concert halls

Boolean Algebra with applications to circuit designs

The Arrow's Dictator/Impossibility Theorem

The Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem

Squaring a Circle