Scientist who helped unravel mysteries of India's monsoon

When she was a young woman in college, Sulochana Gadgil jumped out of a window of a classroom once to escape from a boring class.

- Jayashree Nandi

Math was her thing, so she decided not to take up engineering but focus on her first love. She eventually completed a master's degree in applied mathematics from Pune university. Degrees from Harvard and MIT followed.

Along the way, she fell in love with the dynamics of the monsoon, and applied math to it, focusing on variations in the monsoon. It is to Gadgil that we owe much of our understanding of this variability to - hugely important in a country where nearly half of the cultivated area is rain-fed, with the Southwest Monsoon accounting for the bulk of it.

On Thursday night, Professor Sulochana Gadgil, whose work on the monsoon has inspired generations of climate scientists, died in Bengaluru. She was 81.

Gadgil was also a woman scientist at a time when it was not easy to be one. In her essay: "My tryst with the Monsoon", part of "The Women Scientists of India", a collection published by Indian Academy of Sciences in 2008, she writes: "Pune where I was born and brought up has for a century and a half been in the forefront of the struggle for the liberation of women...I am the third of four daughters. My parents encouraged us all to study and take to learned professions; two of my sisters are physicians. I also did well in school and college, so I was destined to become a professional!"