Professor V. Balakrishnan is currently an Adjunct Professor of Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. He joined the Indian Institute of Technology Madras as a Professor in 1980 and retired as Professor Emeritus in December 2013. He was educated at the University of Delhi and received his Ph.D. in theoretical high energy physics from Brandeis University, USA, in 1970. He joined IIT Madras after working for a decade at TIFR (Mumbai) and RRC, DAE (Kalpakkam). His research interests have spanned many areas including particle physics, many-body theory, condensed matter physics, stochastic processes, quantum dynamics, nonlinear dynamics and chaos. He has published numerous research papers in these areas and a number of popular pedagogic articles. He has co-authored a monograph titled Beyond the Crystalline State and authored a textbook titled Mathematical Physics with Application,Problems and Solutions. Over nearly four decades, he has taught a wide variety of extremely popular courses at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral levels, comprising all the standard subjects in physics as well as some new and non-traditional ones. He has received high accolades for his teaching at IIT Madras, and his lectures at numerous courses sponsored by the UGC, DST (SERC) and ICTP (Trieste, Italy) have been well-received by their attendees. His video lecture courses under the auspices of the NPTEL programme of the HRD Ministry (available on YouTube) have received very high acclaim. He has held visiting positions at several institutions abroad. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.