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IndianModern

Mathematicians

Amiya Charan Banerjee Amiya Charan Banerjee (23 January 1891 – 31 May 1968) was a

mathematician and educator popularly known as A.C.Banerjee or simply as Professor Banerjee

. Family background His father Gyan Chandra Banerjee was a meritorious student of

Presidency College and was a class mate of Narendranath Dutta (later Swami Vivekananda) when they studied law. He belonged to the zemindar family of Maheshtala in 24 Parganas district, now in West Bengal. While a student he was attracted to the Brahmo Samaj, after listening to some of the speeches of Keshub Chunder Sen. When he converted to Brahmo Samaj, his father tried to get him back to the house by force but when he failed to do so, he disinherited him. He joined the judicial service in Bihar and lived an independent life undeterred by what others thought and did. He married Mrinalini, daughter of the Brahmo leader Nibaran Chandra Mukherjee.

Achievements

On his return to the country, he spent some time in Patna but as there was no suitable post vacant for him, he went to Allahabad and started his teaching career as a professor. Allahabad University was a great centre of learning, buzzing with scientists such as Megh Nad Saha and Nil Ratan Dhar. Prof. Banerjee made notable contributions in the field of astro-physics and galactic dynamics. He was vice-chancellor of Allahabad University from 1953-55. He was examiner for doctoral thesis for several universities in India and abroad, and went abroad a number of times on lecture tours. Government of India had assigned to him a project for studying the observatories in Europe and America and for recommending improvements of Indian observatories. On retirement he helped to develop Sri Chaitanya College at Habra in West Bengal. He presided over the All India Brahmo Conference held in 1957

Prof. Banerjee was nominated president of the 56th session of the Indian Science Congress to be held at Mumbai in 1969 but he died prematurely on 31 May 1968.

He used to deliver lectures on astronomy. He spoke on “Stellar Evolution” at the Allahabad session of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1946.

The road in front of his house in Allahabad was named after him.

Dijen K. Ray- Chaudhuri Dwijendra Kumar Ray-Chaudhuri (Born November 1,

1933) a Bengali-born mathematician and a statistician is a professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He and his student R. M. Wilson together solved Kirkman's schoolgirl problem in 1968.

He is best known for his work in design theory and the theory of error-correcting codes, in which the class of BCH codes is partly named after him and his Ph.D. advisor Bose. Ray-Chaudhuri is the recipient of the Euler Medal by the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications for his career contributions to combinatorics. In 2000, a festschrift appeared on the occasion of his 65th birthday.

Ray-Chaudhuri was born in Narayanganj village in Bengal, British India. He received his M.Sc. (1956) in mathematics from the University of Calcutta and Ph.D. in combinatorics (1959) from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is married to Joyasree Ray-Chaudhuri. They have three children.

Harish-Chandra

Harish-Chandra (Harish Chandra Mehrotra; 11 October 1923 – 16 October 1983) was an Indian mathematician, who did fundamental work in representation theory, especially Harmonic analysis on semisimple Lie groups.

LIFE Harish-Chandra was born in Kanpur (then Cawnpore), British India.

He was educated at B.N.S.D. College, Kanpur, and at the University of Allahabad. After receiving his masters degree in Physics in 1943, he moved to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for further studies in theoretical physics and worked with Homi J. Bhabha.

In 1945, he moved to University of Cambridge, Cambridge and worked as a research student under Paul Dirac. While at Cambridge, he attended lectures by Wolfgang Pauli, and during one of them pointed out a mistake in Paul's work. The two were to become life long friends. During this time he became increasingly interested in mathematics. At Cambridge he obtained his PhD in 1947.

When Dirac visited Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, U.S.A. in 1947/48 he brought Harish-Chandra as his assistant. It was at this stage that Harish-Chandra decided to change over from physics to mathematics.

He was a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey from 1963.

From 1968, until his death in 1983, he was IBM von Neumann Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

He died of a heart attack while on an evening walk on October 16, 1983, during a conference in Princeton in honour of Armand Borel's 60th birthday. A similar conference for his 60th birthday, scheduled for the following year, instead became a memorial conference. He is survived by his wife, Lalitha (Lily), and his daughters Premala (Premi), and Devaki.

Work in mathematics

He was influenced by the mathematicians Hermann Weyl and Claude Chevalley. From 1950 to 1963 he was at the Columbia University and worked on representations of semisimple Lie groups. During this period he established as his special area the study of the discrete series representations of semisimple Lie groups, which are analogues of the Peter–Weyl theory in the non-compact case.

He is also known for work with Armand Borel on the theory of arithmetic groups; and for papers on finite group analogues. He enunciated a philosophy of cusp forms, a precursor of the Langlands philosophy.

Honors and awards He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.

and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was the recipient of the Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society, in 1954. The Indian National Science Academy honoured him with the Srinivasa Ramanujan Medal in 1974.

The mathematics department of B.N.S.D. College, Kanpur celebrates his birthday every year in different forms, which includes lectures from students and professors from various colleges, institutes and students' visit to Harish-Chandra Research Institute.

The Indian Government named the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, an institute dedicated to Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, after him.

Robert Langlands wrote in a biographical article of Harish-Chandra: “ He was considered for the Fields Medal in 1958, but a forceful

member of the selection committee in whose eyes Thom was a Bourbakist was determined not to have two. So Harish-Chandra, whom he also placed on the Bourbaki camp, was set aside.

Jayant Narlikar

Dr. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar (born July 19, 1938) (Marathi: जयंत वि�ष्णू नारळीकर) is an Indian cosmologist.

Narlikar is a proponent of the steady state cosmology. He developed with Sir Fred Hoyle the conformal gravity theory, commonly known as Hoyle–Narlikar theory. It synthesizes Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Mach's Principle. It proposes that the inertial mass of a particle is a function of the masses of all other particles, multiplied by a coupling constant, which is a function of cosmic epoch. In cosmologies based on this theory, the gravitational constant G decreases strongly with time.

Early life Narlikar was born in Kolhapur, India on

July 19, 1938. His father, Vishnu Vasudev Narlikar, was a mathematician who served as a professor and later as the Head of the Department of Mathematics at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Jayant's mother, Sumati Narlikar, was a scholar of Sanskrit language. He studied in Kendriya Vidyalaya Banaras(till class 12) and Banaras Hindu University(12th Onwards) campus, Varanasi.

Honours In year 2011 Hon.Narlikar received highest civilian award in

Maharashtra state which in MAHARASHTRA BHUSHAN. Narlikar has received several national and international awards and honorary doctorates. India’s second highest civilian honor, Padma Vibhushan, was awarded to him in 2004 for his research work. Prior to this, in 1965, he was conferred PADMA Bhushan.

He received Maharashtra Bhushan Award for the year 2010. He is a recipient of Bhatnagar Award, M.P. Birla Award, and the

Prix Jules Janssen of the French Astronomical Society. He is an Associate of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, and a Fellow of the three Indian National Science Academies and the Third World Academy of Sciences.

Apart from his scientific research, Narlikar has been well known as a communicator of science through his books, articles, and radio & television programs. For these efforts, he was honored in 1996 by the UNESCO with the Kalinga Award.

He was once featured on Carl Sagan's TV show Cosmos: A Personal Voyage in the late 1980s. He received the Indira Gandhi Award of the Indian National Science Academy in 1990.

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis FRS (Bengali: প্রশান্ত

চন্দ্র মহলানবি�স) (29 June 1893 – 28 June 1972) was an Indian scientist and applied statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure. He made pioneering studies in anthropometry in India. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute, and contributed to the design of large scale sample surveys. [1][2]

Honours Weldon Medal from Oxford University (1944) Fellow of the Royal Society, London (1945) President of Indian Science Congress (1950) Fellow of the Econometric Society, U.S.A. (1951) Fellow of the Pakistan Statistical Association (1952) Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, U.K. (1954) Sir Deviprasad Sarvadhikari Gold Medal (1957) Foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1958) Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge (1959) Fellow of the American Statistical Association (1961) Durgaprasad Khaitan Gold Medal (1961) Padma Vibhushan (1968) Srinivasa Ramanujam Gold Medal (1968) The government of India decided in 2006 to celebrate his

birthday, 29 June, as National Statistical Day.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (October 19, 1910 – August 21, 1995) [1] was a British India born Indian-American astrophysicist who, with William A. Fowler, won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for key discoveries that led to the currently accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars.[2][3] Chandrasekhar was the nephew of Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930.

Chandrasekhar served on the University of Chicago faculty from 1937 until his death in 1995 at the age of 84. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1953.

Awards Fellow of the Royal Society (1944) Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1949)[9]

Bruce Medal (1952)[10]

Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1953)[11]

Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1957)[12]

National Medal of Science, USA (1966)[13]

Padma Vibhushan (1968) Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences

(1971)[14]

Nobel Prize in Physics (1983) Copley Medal of the Royal Society (1984) Honorary Fellow of the International Academy of Science

(1988)

Nobel prizeHe was awarded the

Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his studies on the physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars. Chandrasekhar accepted this honor, but was upset that the citation mentioned only his earliest work, seeing it as a denigration of a lifetime's achievement. He shared it with William A. Fowler.

Legacy Chandrasekhar's most notable work was the astrophysical

Chandrasekhar limit. The limit describes the maximum mass of a white dwarf star, ~1.44 solar masses, or equivalently, the minimum mass above which a star will ultimately collapse into a neutron star or black hole (following a supernova). The limit was first calculated by Chandrasekhar in 1930 during his maiden voyage from India to Cambridge, England for his graduate studies. In 1999, NASA named the third of its four "Great Observatories" after Chandrasekhar. This followed a naming contest which attracted 6,000 entries from fifty states and sixty-one countries. The Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999. The Chandrasekhar number, an important dimensionless number of magnetohydrodynamics, is named after him. The asteroid 1958 Chandra is also named after Chandrasekhar. American astronomer Carl Sagan, who studied Mathematics under Chandrasekhar, at the University of Chicago, praised him in the book The Demon-Haunted World: "I discovered what true mathematical elegance is from Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar."

MADE BY:- BALJINDER, ABHINAV, UTKARSH, AND PALASH.