Mathukumalli Vidyasagar

Timeline

1. 1947–1969

   A Wisconsin doctorate at 21

   He is born in Guntur, India, in 1947 and earns B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1965, 1967 and 1969. He finishes the bachelor's degree by age 17 and the doctorate at 21, with Thomas J. Higgins as his doctoral advisor.

2. 1969–1989

   Professor at Concordia and Waterloo

   After a year as an assistant professor at Marquette University from 1969, he teaches at Concordia University in Montreal from 1970 and at the University of Waterloo from 1980. At 35, in 1983, he becomes an IEEE Fellow for contributions to the stability analysis of linear and nonlinear distributed systems. Robot Dynamics and Control, written with Mark W. Spong, appears in 1989, one of two books by the pair that become popular textbooks on robot dynamics and control.

3. 1989–2000

   Director of CAIR in Bangalore

   In 1989, he returns to India as director of the newly created Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) in Bangalore, a DRDO defence laboratory. His group builds one of the first chess-playing robots in the world and a 3-D virtual reality environment for training fighter pilots, and his theories are used to design controllers for India's Tejas fighter. DRDO names him Scientist of the Year in 1997.

4. 1997–2003

   A theory of learning and generalization

   In 1997, he publishes A Theory of Learning and Generalization: With Applications to Neural Networks and Control Systems, with a second edition, Learning and Generalization, in 2003. His work combines probability theory, combinatorics and artificial intelligence into a unified theory of statistical learning, which he uses to solve NP-hard design problems. In 2002, his Automatica paper on randomized algorithms for robust controller synthesis using statistical learning theory wins the IFAC best methodology paper prize.

5. 2000–2009

   Executive vice president at TCS

   In 2000, he joins Tata Consultancy Services as an executive vice president and heads its Advanced Technology Center, where a team of 80 engineers and scientists works on advanced encryption, open-source software, quantitative finance and bioinformatics. The IEEE Control Systems Award follows in 2008, for contributions to robust control, robotics and statistical learning theory. He retires from TCS in 2009.

6. 2009–2018

   Systems biology chair at UT Dallas

   In 2009, he joins UT Dallas as Cecil & Ida Green Chair in Systems Biology Science and serves as founding head of its new Bioengineering Department from March 2010 to July 2013. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012, he applies machine learning methods to personalised cancer therapy. With a Jawaharlal Nehru Science Fellowship from January 2015, he divides his time between UT Dallas and IIT Hyderabad, and in January 2018 he stops teaching at UT Dallas and moves full-time to Hyderabad.

7. 2020–2025

   SUTRA and a national science chair

   He holds a SERB National Science Chair from March 2020 to February 2025 and spends fall 2020 as a visiting scientist in the Simons Institute's Theory of Reinforcement Learning program. With Manindra Agrawal, Madhuri Kanitkar and others, he coauthors SUTRA, first posted in January 2021, a COVID-19 model that learns two parameters from daily new case counts; the team applies it to thirty-two countries.

8. As of October 2026

   Distinguished professor at IIT Hyderabad

   He is a Distinguished Professor at IIT Hyderabad, where his research on nonconvex optimization and reinforcement learning uses stochastic approximation theory to unify current algorithms. In April 2023, he posts A Tutorial Introduction to Reinforcement Learning, a survey built around stochastic approximation that covers temporal difference learning and Q-learning. A 2025 paper with Rajeeva L. Karandikar extends batch asynchronous stochastic approximation to reinforcement learning.