V. Lakshmibai

In this Indian name, the name Venkatraman is a patronymic, and the person should be referred to by the given name, Lakshmibai.

Venkatramani Lakshmibai (1944 – 2 December 2023) was an Indian mathematician who was a professor emerita of mathematics at Northeastern University in Boston. Her research concerned algebraic geometry, the theory of algebraic groups, and representation theory,^[1] including in particular the theory of flag varieties and Schubert varieties.

Lakshmibai was born in 1944 in a small town in southern India.^[2] She earned her PhD in 1976 from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research^[1] under the direction of C. S. Seshadri.^[3] She left India to teach in Europe and then in the United States, where she was a professor at Northeastern University from 1987 to 2019.^[2] With Sara Billey she was the co-author of the monograph Singular Loci of Schubert Varieties (Progress in Mathematics 182, Birkhäuser, 2000).^[4] She also co-authored two monographs with Justin Brown: Flag Varieties: An Interplay of Geometry, Combinatorics, and Representation Theory (Texts and Readings in Mathematics 53, Hindustan Book Agency, 2009)^[5] and The Grassmannian Variety: Geometric and Representation-Theoretic Aspects (Developments in Mathematics 42, Springer, 2015).^[6]

In 2012 she was selected as one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.^[7]

Lakshmibai died on 2 December 2023, at the age of 78.^[8]