Education

He obtained his MSc in Physics (1980) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) under Geoffrey Fox (1984), resulting in a thesis entitled: Monte Carlo Renormalisation Group for Lattice QCD.

Career

He was a Scientific Associate, Theory Division, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 1987-1989, and the in 1989 he joined the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, as a faculty member.

In 1989 he married Rashmi, a surgeon specializing in laparoscopy and endosurgery. His son, Aavishkar, was born 1990.

Patel's Erdős Number is four, and his path to Paul Erdős is as follows:

Tathagat Tulsi, Lov K. Grover, and Apoorva Patel, "A new algorithm for fixed point quantum search," Quantum Inf. Comput., 6(6), pp.483-494, (2006).
Lov K. Grover and Terry Rudolph, "How significant are the known collision and element distinctness quantum algorithms?" Quantum Inf. Comput., 4(3), pp. 201-206, (2004).
Koenraad Audenaert, Chris Godsil, Gordon Royle, and Terry Rudolph, "Symmetric squares of graphs," J. Combin. Theory Ser., B 97(1), pp. 74-90, (2007).
Paul Erdös, Chris D. Godsil, S. G. Krantz, and T. D. Parsons, "Intersection graphs for families of balls in $Rsp n$." European J. Combin. 9(5), pp. 501-505, (1988).