Agnes Scott College

Iqbal Unnisa

November 21, 1936 - June 12, 2011

Iqbal Unnisa was born in 1936 in Meenambur, a small village in the state of Tamil-Nadu, India. Her father was the Postmaster in Meenambur and her mother was a housewife. The family later moved to Chennai where Unnisa studied at the Government Hobart Girls' High School. She pursued additional courses at Ethiraj College where she scored full marks in mathematics and won the General Proficiency Award. In 1957 she received her BA with Honors in mathematics from Presidency College in Chennai, getting first place in the University exams. Unnisa became the first Muslim woman in India to receive a doctoral degree in mathematics when she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Madras in 1964 with a dissertation in lattice theory under the direction of Dr. V. S. Krishnan.

Unnisa remained at the University of Madras where she became a professor at the Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics. In July 1990, she became the first woman to serve as the Director of this Institute. She later moved to Saudi Arabia where she served as Professor of Mathematics at the King Saud University College of Science in Riyadh. She married Dr. Mohammed Kokan in 1966 and had two sons.

Unnisa supervised six Ph.D. and 20 M.Phil students during her long career. Her mathematical research was primarily in lattice theory. In 1964 she published a paper "On Neutral Elements in a Lattice" in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society (Vol 28, No. 1, p25-31). In 1966 two papers on "Normal, simple and neutral conguences on lattices" and "Permutable congruences in a lattice" and appeared in the Illinois Journal of Mathematics (Vol 10, no. 2, p227-234 and Vol 10, no. 2, p235-239. The results of these three papers formed part of her doctoral thesis at the University of Madras. Unnisa co-authored a book on Supermodular Lattices with W. B. Wasantha Kandasamy and Florentin Smarandache that was published in 2012 by Educational Publisher, Inc.

References

  1. http://www.ambedkaraims.org/index.pdf
  2. About the Department, Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics website.
  3. About the Authors, Supermodular Lattices, page 131.