Gautam Mitra

Until the age of 14 Gautam was taught by his mother Meera Rani Mitra who had a thorough grounding in Mathematics and academic topics prior to her marriage at an early age. This foundational training had kindled Gautam's interest in all aspects of Mathematics and its applications.

After joining Presidency University, Kolkata in 1956 for intermediate science he made the choice of academic work and dropped competitive sports and hobby. This was the time in India when Engineering was seen to be the future pillar of the country. He had to make another choice between Science and Engineering, so he joined and graduated as an Electrical Engineer from Jadavpur University. The next choice for Post Graduate Studies was between Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Queen Mary University of London. As the tradition in the family was to travel to the UK rather than USA, in 1962 he joined Queen Mary University of London for an MPhil in Electrical Engineering. But attending a workshop in Mercury Auto (assembly) Code for numerical computation he was completely smitten by the new technology. To the disappointment of his QMC supervisor with whom he had written two papers and designed a measuring instrument he joined the newly formed Institute of Computer Science as a temporary programmer and then a research fellow gaining a PhD in 1968.

During school days he was a junior Table Tennis (state) Champion and a star ‘Aero Modeller’. In later life he is passionate about tennis: he plays and watches Tennis with equal interest.

Gautam believes in research and is excited by creating and exploiting knowledge. He sees the former as part of Science and the latter as part of Engineering; his role models are Thomas Edison, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Claude Shannon and Edward O. Thorp. He is very much inspired by their lives and achievements.

After his PhD Gautam had to make a choice between academia and industry. He started in industry but in 1974 switched to academia and Joined Brunel University London and retired in 2009. The retirement gave him the chance to fulfil his ambition as an entrepreneur. The two companies UNICOM, a knowledge dissemination company and OptiRisk, an analytics company are academic spinoffs. Having left the academia, Gautam and his wife Dhira have devoted their energies to develop and grow these two companies.

Gautam believes in honesty, transparency, respect as essential part of one's value system. Gautam values questioning and criticism when this is constructive. On his part he does not hold back criticism of his friends, colleagues and peers when he considers this to be appropriate.