His brilliant career as a professor of mathematics was also sprinkled with a lot of controversies, particularly, with the majority of faculty members in the academic council and board of studies voting against his motion to revise mathematics syllabus of various courses in the University of Kerala. He had to resort to the extreme step of walking out of the council meetings in protest against the intransigent attitude of teachers to change an outdated syllabus, course content and scheme of examinations. In fact, he introduced a different kind of entrance test for students seeking admission to research programs in mathematics wherein he provided a few math problems to each student, intending to do research, with freedom to discuss the problems with anyone or consult any text book before filing answers within a pre-defined period. Albeit, it was a novel way of evaluating one’s aptitude and intelligence, KSSN’s procedure markedly deviated from the stone age method of seeking answers for a set of stock questions that were usually memorized by the students to write on the answer paper without any application of mind. Many faculty members and researchers as well didn’t like the radical shift from the customary practices and tried their best to tarnish the image of KSSN although they didn’t succeed in their efforts.
Beautiful fonts enchanted KSSN always. He has an unfulfilled dream of creating a complete set of fonts for Malayalam, his mother tongue (mine as well) using Metafont, the programming language developed by Donald Knuth to define vector fonts. In tune with Knuth’s warning in the Metafont Book — type design can be hazardous to your other interests. Once you get hooked, you will develop intense feelings about letter forms … — KSSN hasn’t got into this task yet since a lot of work remains to be done in his huge research volume under publication now. An excellent TeX programmer himself, in the pre LaTeX2e days, KSSN had written several packages in plain TeX, like the one to format documents in two column that can balance columns in the last page, although with the advent of LaTeX2e, his packages became obsolete since he himself switched from plain TeX to LaTeX. KSSN truly believes and lives to the saying that your achievements will be incredible if you pay scant attention to who takes away the credit. For this singular reason, he leads a very peaceful and fulfilling life to the amazement of people surrounding him.
Thank you for sharing so much detail about KSSN, who is an inspiration to us all.
Thanks for posting such a wonderful page about Prof KSSN. For a person like me, who had recently joined the community, it is more like reading a book on him. All I know all these days were only his name and him — in person.
It is most influencing while reading that I read at least a single paragraph once in a day since I came to know about this page. I sincerely suggest that this page should be made available to the entire team of RVT.
KSSN = Attitude + Commitment + Dedication + Achievement …
I require a huge box with a limitless dimension to complete this equation!
His presence with us itself is a gift!
I was all in tears even though most of the facts were known to me.
I am completely with Prof KSSN. “I do not know but I will do my best to find out” is the mark of a teacher who deserves respect, not condemnation. Respect has to be earned, it is not an automatic right through age or qualifications; politeness yes, respect no.
Perhaps those who hounded KSSN did so out of fear that the thinness of their own knowledge in some areas would be revealed?
To feed a student an incorrect answer to cover one’s lack of certainty does no one any favours, least of all the student.