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Failure, obsession and beauty: Khare on his mathematical journey
Renowned mathematician, professor Chandrashekhar Khare, offered a rare and deeply personal peek into the life of a mathematician during a conversation at IISER in Pune on January 14
PUNE: Renowned mathematician, professor Chandrashekhar Khare, offered a rare and deeply personal peek into the life of a mathematician during a conversation at the Indo-European Conference held at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) on Wednesday, January 14, 2026. He described mathematics as a creative, emotional, and often frustrating human pursuit.
Khare was speaking about his book titled, Chasing a Conjecture: Inside the Mind of a Mathematician. He deliberately avoided heavy technical explanations and instead focused on the process of thinking, failing, and persisting. “I did not want to write a technical book. I wanted general readers to feel what it is like to think mathematically,” Khare said.
The mathematician recalled nearly failing his school entrance exam at the age of five, struggling through graduate school in the US, and even failing a qualifying exam. “Mathematics is about trying and failing repeatedly,” he said, emphasising that persistence, rather than sheer brilliance, sustained his career.
He stressed that mathematical thinking does not take place in isolation. Ideas came to him while walking, watching cricket, travelling, or sitting beside his mother in hospital. “What you do when you are not doing mathematics influences the mathematics you do,” he noted.
In one moving passage from Chasing a Conjecture, Khare describes thinking about an unsolved problem while watching albumin drip into an IV bottle beside his ailing mother. The slow drip, he said, shaped the way he perceived mathematical ideas.
Khare explained Serre’s conjecture, the central problem of his career, using analogy rather than formulae. He compared it to a Rosetta Stone, allowing translation between two previously disconnected worlds – Galois symmetries and Ramanujan symmetries – much like how Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism.
“Analogies are fundamental to mathematics,” he said. “They help us approach problems we do not yet understand.”
Thinking about Serre’s conjecture became an obsession spanning nearly 10 years, even though Khare never expected to solve it. “Good questions take you on a journey, even if you don’t answer them,” he said. The breakthrough came unexpectedly in 2004 during a visit to France, when a discussion with collaborator Jean-Pierre Wintenberger revealed a crucial idea. “It was a very vivid moment. Once you think about something for years, you remember every big idea,” he recalled.
Surprisingly, proving the conjecture left him feeling lost. “It had defined my life for years. Once it was done, I didn’t know what to do next,” he admitted. The years that followed were again marked by struggle and searching for new problems.
Comparing writing to mathematics, Khare said writing was in some ways harder. “In mathematics, you can think silently. Writing only happens when you write. It’s contingent, full of choices,” he explained. His book, he emphasised, is not meant to explain advanced mathematics, but to show how mathematicians think, struggle, collaborate, and live.
Asked about artificial intelligence, Khare said tools like ChatGPT are impressive but are unlikely to replace human mathematical thinking. “Mathematics is ultimately a very personal pursuit,” he said, expressing hope that technology will remain a tool rather than a substitute.
