The first Indian Institute of Technology was IIT Kharagpur, founded in 1951, at which Nehru gave the first convocation address in 1956.
He called it "India's future in the making". It was declared an Institute of National Importance by the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur) Act.
Kharagpur is in West Bengal, in the Eastern part of India (state capital Calcutta, or Kolkata).
The second IIT to be founded was IIT Bombay in 1958. Campuses were scattered throughout India to prevent regional imbalance.
Entrance to IITs is by Joint Entrance Exam (JEE). Exams must be taken in:
- Physics
- Chemistry
- Mathematics
plus an additional aptitude test for Architecture candidates (where knowledge of famous monuments and their architects is tested).
In mathematics, some of the more tricky or unusual requirements include the following.
e.g. knowledge of harmonic series. In the harmonic series, each term is inverse of a term in an arithmetic progression. e.g. 1,2,3,4,5.. becomes 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5. Each term of the harmonic series is the harmonic mean of neighbouring terms (2(x1)(x2) / (x1+x2)).
Also analytic geometry skills must be extremely good. e.g. do you know the equation of a circle? For a circle with centre (a,b) the easiest way is to think of it in terms of its "standard form" (x-a)^2 + (y-b)^2 = r^2. The equation x^2 + y^2 = 1 is the unit circle centre (0,0).
In chemistry, some of the basic concepts you will need include kinetic theory of gases (the idea of gases as collections of atoms and molecules moving randomly in space).
Physical chemistry topics are required (where we apply physics to chemistry), covering how matter behaves at the molecular and atomic level, and explaining how reactions occur. John Dalton's premise that all matter is composed of atoms is assumed.
