The institute began functioning in 1999 inside a room of the Pathani Samanta Planetarium in Bhubaneswar.

On 23 July 2008, IMA acquired its residential campus, built by Tata Steel in Bhubaneswar city, when it was established as a full-fledged, degree-granting academic institution.

Finance as a subject has emerged to be an extremely involved branch of knowledge with a growing number of stock exchanges and investors in the field.

Risk and return that constitute cardinal aspects of the subject remain as a major concern for every investor, individual as well as institutional.

In apparently erratic behaviors of the market, however, the mathematicians try to capture patterns vis-a-vis predictability, which may help investors decide on their investment.

Computational finance otherwise called financial engineering deals with portfolio selection, options, and futures, asset pricing, managing derivative markets, and hedging under uncertainty.

The main Institute is a 7,000 square meters (75,000 sq ft) complex, which was designed by architect Karan Grover, with an investment of Rs.

A well-stocked library with more than 5000 latest references on mathematical, financial, computational, and related subjects, as well as national and international professional journals, which support the institute's teaching, research, and extension programs.

The current focus areas of research within the institute include Wavelet analysis, Stochastic processes, Functional analysis, Algebraic topology, Differential geometry, Group representations, Operator theory, Fuzzy logic, Geometric applications in Physics, Approximation theory, Lie algebra, Astronomy, Thermodynamics, and Statistical Physics, Quantum mechanics and Cyclone modeling, Machine Learning in Finance, Computational Finance, etc.