Welcome to the Home Page of

Bikas K. Chakrabarti

At Cafés Sciences, École Centrale
Paris, June 2010

At Econophys-Kolkata I, Saha Institute of
Nuclear Physics, March 2005

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Namaskar! This is Bikas. My brief CV is as follows: Born in Dec. 1952, in Calcutta, to Bimal K. Chakrabarti and Pratima Chakrabarti. Got my Ph. D. Degree from Calcutta University in 1979. Married to Mrs. Kaberi Chakrabarti. Have two sons: Kalyan-Sundar Chakrabarti and Anindya-Sundar Chakrabarti.

I have professional interest in statistical physics, condensed matter physics, computational physics, and their application to social sciences. See my papers, reviews or books.

At present, Professor of Physics, Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata and Visiting Professor of Economics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Authored/co-authored more than 170 papers in refereed journals, 6 reviews [Eur. Phys. J. B, Phys. Rep. & 4 in Rev. Mod. Phys. (out of a total 33 reviews published in RMP so far, authored/coauthored by at least one scientist from India, since 1929; source: 'Affiliation' India search at the journal site -- Errata excluded)], 6 books [Cambridge Univ. Press, 2 Oxford Univ. Press, 2 Springer, Wiley-VCH].

Editorial Board member of: ♦ European Physical Journal B (present) ♦ Indian Journal of Physics (present) ♦ Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination (present) ♦ Natural Science (present) ♦ Pramana -- Journal of Physics (past)

A few representative (review) Papers : ♦ Dynamic Transitions and Hysteresis (with M. Acharyya), Rev. Mod. Phys. 71 (1999) 847 ♦ Kinetic Exchange Models for Income and Wealth Distributions (with A. Chatterjee), Eur. Phys. J. B 60 (2007) 135 ♦ Quantum Annealing and Analog Quantum Computations (with A. Das), Rev. Mod. Phys. 80 (2008) 1061 ♦ Failure Processes in Elastic Fiber Bundles (with A. Hansen & S. Pradhan), Rev. Mod. Phys. 82 (2010) 499 ♦ Statistical Physics of Fracture, Friction and Earthquakes (with S. Biswas, T. Hatano, N. Kato & H. Kawamura), Rev. Mod. Phys. 84 (2012) 839.
                                                                                                       &
Books : ♦ Quantum Ising Phases & Transitions in Transverse Ising Models (with A. Dutta & P. Sen), Springer, Heidelberg (1996) ♦ Statistical Physics of Fracture & Breakdown in Disordered Systems (with L. G. Benguigui), Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford (1997) ♦ Econophysics: An Introduction (with A. Chakraborti, A. Chatterjee & S. Sinha), Wiley-VCH, Berlin (2010) ♦ Quantum Ising Phases & Transitions in Transverse Ising Models (with J.-I. Inoue & S. Suzuki), Springer, Heidelberg (2012) ♦ Econophysics of Income & Wealth Distributions (with A. Chakraborti, S. R. Chakravarty & A. Chatterjee), Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge (2013) ♦ Sociophysics: An Introduction (with P. Sen), Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford (2013; in Press).

Supervised Ph.D. theses of: S. S. Manna (1987) * A. K. Roy (1988) * P. Ray (1989) * M. Ghosh (1992) * P. Raychaudhuri (Sen) (1993) * K. Barat (1995) * M. Acharyya (1996) * A. Dutta (2000) * P. Bhattacharyya (2000) * A. Misra (2001) * A. Chakraborti (2003) * S. Pradhan (2005) * A. Chatterjee (2008) * A. Das (2008).

Citations of our work include: ♦ Editorial of Topical Issue on Physics in Society, The European Physical Journal B, Vol 57 (2007) pp 121-125, incorporating 2 of ours, in an Editorial Choice-list of 21 "exemplifying pioneering" publications (earliest in 1872) in "Economy & Political Economy"; ♦ Discussions on "pioneering" papers from "Chakrabarti's research group" (p 187; pp 185-206) in Applied Partial Differential Equations (by P A Markowich) Springer, Berlin (2007); ♦ Entry on Econophysics in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Ed., Vol 2, Macmillan, NY (2008), pp 729-732, beginning with "According to Bikas Chakrabarti (...), the term 'econophysics' was neologized in 1995 at the second Statphys-Kolkata conference in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India ..." ; ♦ Discussions on "influential" papers (p. 2803) from "Kolkata School" (p. 2808; pp. 2800-2826; see also pp. 2792-2800) in Encyclopedia of Complexity & System Science, Vol. 3, Springer, New York (2009); ♦ Discussions on "influential" (p. 1705) & "elegant" (p. 1711) papers from "Kolkata School" (p. 1711) in Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 81 (2009) pp. 1703-1725; ♦ Editorial of The European Physical Journal: Special Topics, Vol. 195 (2011), pp 1-2, mentioning that the volume contains "... three white papers of the EU project VISIONEER ... followed by six commentaries from distinguished researchers in the field of complex system sciences ... Prof. Bikas Chakrabarti, ...",; ♦ Feature article on "The Physics of our Finances", saying "So in 2000, Bikas Chakrabarti's team in the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata, India ... [introduced another model with distributed savings, and with] this tweak, the model correctly reproduced the whole wealth distribution curve ... If these simple models do capture something of the essence of the real-world economics, then they offer some good news." , p. 41, New Scientist, 28 July, 2012.

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