Recent Colloquium

Inequalities in income and wealth distributions have been a permanent feature of the societies in any civilization, and are characterized by established and universal laws. The century old kinetic theory for the gases had long been identified as a possible tool to explore the origin of such inequalities. Such kinetic exchange formulations for social dynamics will be discussed and the recent developments will be indicated. Extensions of the kinetic theory to collective opinion formations in societies will also be discussed.

Finally a new measure, namely the k-index, for social inequality in income/wealth across population in societies and in citations earned by publications in universities/institutes, will be introduced and the common features in their observed properties will be discussed.

Prof. Bikas K. Chakrabarti presently working as a senior professor and he was the former director at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP), Kolkata. He is also a visiting professor of Economics at Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata. He obtained his Ph. D. degree from Calcutta University in 1979. Then he moved to Department of Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford for his Post Doctoral study. Later on he joined Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Cologne as a Post Doctoral Fellow. He came back to Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics as a faculty in 1983. 

The research activity of Prof. Chakrabarti is mainly focused on statistical physics, condensed matter physics, computational physics, and their application to social sciences. He has authored/co-authored more than 175 papers in Physics, Economics and interdisciplinary journals.

His awards and achievements include Young Scientist Award of INSA (1984), Professeur Invité, University of Paris, UP13, Lab-PMTM, CNRS (1988), Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award, CSIR India (1997), Fellow, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore (1997), Fellow, Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi (2003), Honorary Visiting Professor, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata (2007), Outstanding Referee Award of the American Physical Society (2010), Professeur Invité, École Centrale Paris (2010), J C Bose National Fellow, DST India (2011-16), Excellent Reviewer Award, Physica A, Elsevier (2013).