Seshachalu
Narasimhan
(born 1932) is an eminent Indian mathematician.
He is well known along with C S Seshadri
for their proof of the Narasimhan–Seshadri theorem, and both were
elected as FRS.
Narasimhan
did his undergraduate studies at Loyola College, Chennai, where he was
taught by Fr Racine. Fr Racine had studied with
the famous French mathematicians Élie Cartan and Jacques Hadamard,
and connected his students with the latest developments in modern mathematics.
Among Racine's other students who achieved eminence, Mudumbaiwe may count
Minakshisundaram, K. G. Ramanathan,
C S Seshadri, Raghavan Narasimhan, and C. P. Ramanujam.
Narasimhan
went to the Tata Institute of Fundamental
Research
(TIFR), Bombay, for his graduate
studies. He obtained his Ph.D. from University of Mumbai in 1960; his
advisor was K. Chandrasekharan. Among
Narasimhan's distinguished students is M. S. Raghunathan
who followed in this footsteps to bag the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize as well
as become FRS. Two other students who made a mark as top-notch mathematicians
are S. Ramanan and V. K. Patodi.
Degrees
and posts held
Awards and felicitations
Awards and felicitations
• Visiting
Scholar, Institute for Advanced Study
(1968-1969)
• Fellow
of the Royal Society, London
• Head,
Mathematics Group of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical
Physic
(1992–1999)
• Honorary
Fellow, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore Centre.
• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize (1975)
• Third
World Academy Award for Mathematics (1987)
• Padma Bhushan
(1990)
• King Faisal International Prize for
Science,
2006 (jointly with Simon Donaldson, Imperial College)
CP RAMANUJAM
Chakravarthi Padmanabhan Ramanujam (January 9, 1938 – October 27, 1974) worked in the fields of number
theory and algebraic geometry. He was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 1973.
Like his namesake Srinivasa
Ramanujan, Ramanujam also had a
very short life.
As David
Mumford put it, Ramanujam felt
that the spirit of mathematics demanded of him not merely routine developments
but the right theorem on any given topic. "He wanted mathematics to be
beautiful and to be clear and simple. He was sometimes tormented by the
difficulty of these high standards, but in retrospect, it is clear to us how
often he succeeded in adding to our knowledge, results both new, beautiful and
with a genuinely original stamp".
Ramanujam set out for Mumbai at the age of eighteen to pursue his interest in
mathematics. He and his friend and schoolmate Raghavan
Narasimhan, and S. Ramanan joined TIFR together in 1957. At the Tata Institute there was
a stream of first rate visiting mathematicians from all over the world. It was
a tradition for some graduate student to write up the notes of each course of
lectures. Accordingly, Ramanujam wrote up in his first year, the notes of Max Deuring's lectures on Algebraic
functions of one variable. It was a nontrivial effort and the notes were
written clearly and were well received. The analytical mind was much in
evidence in this effort as he could simplify and extend the notes within a
short time period. "He could reduce difficult solutions to be simple and
elegant due to his deep knowledge of the subject matter" states Ramanan. "Max Deuring's lectures gave him a taste
for Algebraic Number Theory. He
studied not only algebraic
geometry and analytic number theory of
which he displayed a deep knowledge but he became an expert in several other
allied subjects as well".
On the suggestion of his doctoral
advisor, K. G.
Ramanathan, he began working on a
problem relating to the work of the German number theorist Carl Ludwig
Siegel. In the course of proving
the main result to the effect that every cubic form in 54 variables over any
algebraic number field K had a non-trivial zero over that field, he had also
simplified the earlier method of Siegel. He took up Waring's
problem in algebraic number fields and
got interesting results. In recognition of his work and his contribution to Number
Theory, the Institute promoted him
as Associate Professor. He protested against this promotion as 'undeserved',
and had to be persuaded to accept the position. He proceeded to write his
thesis in 1966 and took his Doctoral examination in 1967. Dr. Siegel who was
one of the examiners was highly impressed with the young man's depth of
knowledge and his great mathematical abilities.
Ramanujam was a scribe for
Igor Shafarevich's course
of lectures in 1965 on minimal models and birational transformation of two
dimensional schemes. Professor Shafarevich subsequently wrote to say that
Ramanujam not only corrected his mistakes but complemented the proofs of many
results. The same was the case with Mumford's lectures on abelian varieties
which was delivered at TIFR around 1967. Mumford wrote in the preface to his book that the notes
improved upon his work and that his current work on abelian
varieties was a joint effort
between him and Ramanujam. A little known fact is that during this time he
started teaching himself German, Italian, Russian and French so that he could
study mathematical works in their original form. His personal library contained
quite a few non-English mathematical works.
DONE BY
SUCHITRA
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