About Icts
The idea to create a centre such as the ICTS was born in 2001, after the successful completion of the Strings 2001 conference at TIFR Mumbai and a visit to the Infosys Campus in Bangalore in February 2001, that happened at the insistence of Edward Witten who was keen to visit the ‘temples of modern India’. The former boosted our confidence based on our achievement in fundamental physics and the latter provided confidence that institutional infrastructure and management of the highest international quality is possible in India. This combination of the highest quality science within a modern state of the art campus, managed along modern management lines inspired the basic idea of the ICTS. What made ICTS unique in India is that it was to be an international science hub that would transform the ways of doing scientific research and advanced science education in India. I began by looking for private funds but in 2004 David Gross gave a new impetus to the creation of the ICTS by suggesting a way out of my fumbling efforts to find support from private sources.
The International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) was approved by the TIFR Council in August 2007 to be a multi and interdisciplinary centre with 3 main goals: PROGRAMS that bring together physicists, astronomers, cosmologists, mathematicians, biologists, students and researchers from all over the world, under one roof, to work together to solve the most challenging questions posed by nature, to discover the underlying structures across the sciences and to strive for the unity of knowledge In-house RESEARCH - by highest quality faculty in the theoretical sciences SCIENCE OUTREACH that stimulate and harness the young minds of India and connects with members of the public who are interested in the latest developments of scientific research. To make sure that we were navigating ICTS well we constituted an International Advisory Board of eminent scientists who worked hard to scrutinise and guide the ICTS mission with exacting standards. The Centre also benefited from the strong support of CNR Rao, K. Kasturirangan, H.R. Krishnamurthy and K. VijayRaghavan.