Professor T.N. Krishnaswamy's 1989 paper in the Journal of the ACM, on the complexity of approximation algorithms, has been cited more than 2,400 times in international literature — among the most-cited works in theoretical computer science by an India-based researcher, and the foundation of a forty-year career that has shaped Indian computer science as much through its doctoral graduates as through its own publications.

His doctoral work at MIT, under Professor Michael Sipser, established him early as a theorist of the first rank. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2010 — the first computer scientist based in India to receive that distinction — and served as Director of the Indian Institute of Science from 2012 to 2016, overseeing its expansion from 38 to 50 departments.

The seventy-two PhD students he has supervised include department heads at IITs, researchers at Google Brain, Microsoft Research, and DeepMind, and two winners of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award — a lineage he regards as his principal legacy, ahead of his 118 publications and 24 patents.

The Padma Bhushan he received in 2016 recognised contributions to science and education that extend well past any individual result — what he has described as an effort to build not a body of work, but a culture of work that outlasts any one person's contribution.

Published work includes ""Randomised Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimisation: A Survey"" (ACM Computing Surveys · 1998 · Vol. 30(2)); and ""Privacy-Preserving Distributed Machine Learning: Foundations and Applications"" (Communications of the ACM · 2022 · Vol. 65(4)).

Emeritus Professor, IISc Bengaluru; Chair, ACM India Council; and Member, Prime Minister's Science Advisory Council.

Algorithms & Complexity Theory; Randomised Algorithms; and History of Computer Science.