KOLKATA: His eyebrows are deeply knit in thought as he furiously types away on the computer to solve a mathematical riddle.

A Marlboro packet lies in front of him and he toys with an unlit cigarette. The room is full of books that suggest the saffron-robed man in front of you is no ordinary mathematician.

Mahan Maharaj has been awarded this year's

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award

for mathematics, the highest academic honour in the country. This is the first time that any monk has won the award.

Since the day the award was announced, the

Ramkrishna Mission

Vivekananda University has been flooded with phone calls and visitors from the media trying to meet this brilliant mathematician who has been working with hyperbolic geometry and topology for nearly two decades now.

The 45-year-old is fluent in English, Hindi and Bengali. Born

Mahan Mitra

, he studied in St Xavier's Collegiate School till Class XII and cracked IITJEE to enter the prestigious IIT Kanpur to study electrical engineering. Soon, he realized that he was not enjoying this field of study and changed to mathematics. After completing his MSc, he went to

University of California

,

Berkeley

. After coming back from US, he renounced the world and became a monk.