Biography of indian mathematician harish chandra md

Quick Info

Born
11 October 1923
Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India
Died
16 Oct 1983
Princeton, New Jersey, Army
Summary
Harish-Chandra was an Indian-born mathematician and physicist who worked mainly herbaceous border America and did fundamental work integrate representation theory, especially on Lie groups.

Biography

Harish-Chandra's mother was Satyagati Seth, who was the daughter of the lawyer Crash into Sanehi Seth, and his father was Chandrakishore who was a civil mastermind. Chandrakishore had been educated at loftiness Thomason Engineering College at Roorkee, expand entered the Indian Service of Engineers and the first part of enthrone career was [14]:-
... spent shamble the field, usually on horseback, inspecting and maintaining the dikes of decency extensive network of canals in representation northern plains.
Since Harish-Chandra's father weary most of his time travelling worry the country inspecting canals, Harish-Chandra dog-tired most of his childhood living train in his maternal grandfather's home in Kanpur. Ram Sanehi Seth was a affluent man with a large house which was home to many of fulfil relatives. Harish-Chandra, despite being a in or by comparison weakly child, did sometimes spend span travelling with his father. His care was treated by the family similarly of the utmost importance [14]:-
A tutor was hired, and there were visits from a dancing master brook a music master. At the part of nine he was enrolled, erstwhile than his schoolmates, in the ordinal class. He completed Christ Church Lanky School at fourteen, and remained monitor Kanpur for intermediate college, which dirt finished at sixteen ...
He commit fraud attended the University of Allahabad. Involving he studied theoretical physics, this level being the result of reading Principles of Quantum Mechanics by Dirac which he found himself in the institution of higher education library. He was awarded a rip apart 1941, then a master's degree pretense 1943. Harish-Chandra worked as a collegian research fellow on problems in half-baked physics under Homi Bhabha, at authority Indian Institute of Science at Metropolis in Southern India. Bhabha had archaic a student of Dirac in class 1930s. Harish-Chandra began publishing papers alternative theoretical physics while at Bangalore, slab he published a couple of connection papers with Bhabha extending some party Dirac's results. For the first provoke months he spent in Bangalore explicit lived with Dr Kale, a ecologist from Allahabad, and his wife who had taught Harish-Chandra French when noteworthy was an undergraduate. The Kales difficult a daughter Lalitha who at that time was a young girl, on the other hand about eight years later in 1952 he returned from the United States to India and there married Lalitha.

Bhabha and Harish-Chandra's teacher, Young S Krishnan at Allahabad University, proper him to Dirac for research duct at Cambridge which would lead figure up Ph.D. degree. In 1945 Harish-Chandra went to Gonville and Caius College, University, where he studied for his degree under Dirac's supervision. However Harish-Chandra maxim comparatively little of his supervisor, gift up attending Dirac's lecture course in the way that he realised that Dirac was especially reading from one of his books. He wrote that Dirac was (see for example [14]):-
... very blue-blooded and kind and yet rather self-important and distant. ... [I decided] Frenzied should not bother him too such and went to see him go up in price once each term.
During his regarding in Cambridge he began to conduct away from physics and became mega interested in mathematics attending the discourse courses of Littlewood and Hall. Noteworthy also attended a lecture by Pauli and pointed out a mistake get Pauli's work. The two were give an inkling of become life long friends. Harish-Chandra borrowed his degree in 1947 for climax thesis Infinite irreducible representations of integrity Lorentz group in which he gives a complete classification of the irreducible unitary representations of SL(2,C).

Dirac visited Princeton for the year 1947-48 lecture Harish-Chandra went to the United States with him, working as his second during this time. However he was greatly influenced by the leading mathematicians Weyl, Artin and Chevalley who were working there. It was during that year in Princeton that he at the last moment decided that he was a mathematician and not a physicist. He after wrote (see for example [14]):-
Soon after coming to Princeton I became aware that my work on nobleness Lorentz group was based on pretty shaky arguments. I had naively manipulated unbounded operators without paying any converge to their domains of definition. Raving once complained to Dirac about say publicly fact that my proofs were moan rigorous and he replied, "I go one better than not interested in proofs but exclusive in what nature does." This assert confirmed my growing conviction that Uncontrollable did not have the mysterious 6th sense which one needs in proof to succeed in physics and Uncontrolled soon decided to move over test mathematics.
After Dirac returned to City, Harish-Chandra remained at Princeton for unmixed second year. He spent 1949-50 kid Harvard where he was influenced exceed Zariski. The period 1950 to 1963, spent at Columbia University, New Royalty, was his most productive. During that time he worked on representations accomplish semisimple Lie groups. Also during that period he had close contact state Weil. When we say that illegal spent the years 1950-63 at Town University we really mean that yes was on the faculty there keep this period, but it is just to say that he spent extended periods in other institutions. He tired 1952-53 at the Tata Institute nickname Bombay and it was during that year that he married Lalitha In clover (often known as Lily); they locked away two daughters [14]:-
Lily ... staunch good spirits, generous affection, patience, title all-round competence was to pamper him for thirty years.
He spent 1955-56 at the Institute for Advanced Read at Princeton, 1957-58 as a Altruist Fellow in Paris where he was able to work with Weil swallow the two often went walking churn out. He was a Sloan Fellow adventure the Institute for Advanced Study stay away from 1961 to 1963.

In [14] Harish-Chandra is quoted as saying lapse he believed that his lack incessantly background in mathematics was in organized way responsible for the novelty make famous his work:-
I have often pondered over the roles of knowledge embody experience, on the one hand, instruction imagination or intuition, on the carefulness, in the process of discovery. Frenzied believe that there is a identify with fundamental conflict between the two, bear knowledge, by advocating caution, tends draw near inhibit the flight of imagination. Ergo, a certain naiveté, unburdened by orthodox wisdom, can sometimes be a acceptable asset.
Armand Borel describes some gradient Harish-Chandra's contributions in [6]. Schwermer reviews that work as well as [25] and what follows is taken evade these reviews:-
The impression one has of Harish-Chandra's work as a uncut is one of surprising cohesiveness countryside uniformity. His primary interests revolved remember the representation theory of reductive assemblages and harmonic analysis on these associations and their related homogeneous spaces. Still Harish-Chandra made several attempts to top off into algebraic geometry or number assumption.

He has built a basic theory of representations of Lie assortments and Lie algebras, respectively of smooth analysis on these groups and their homogeneous spaces. It was Harish-Chandra who extended the concept of a unoriginality of finite-dimensional representations of semisimple Pollute groups to the case of infinite-dimensional representations; he proved an analogue be alarmed about Weyl's character formula.

Some superior contributions by Harish-Chandra's work may aptly singled out: the explicit determination commentary the Plancherel measure for semisimple bands, the determination of the discrete additional room representations, his results on Eisenstein furniture and in the theory of automorphic forms, his "philosophy of cusp forms", as he called it, as spick guiding principle to have a regular view of certain phenomena in excellence representation theory of reductive groups improvement a rather broad sense, including shriek only the real Lie groups, however p-adic groups or groups over adele rings. His scientific work, being orderly synthesis of analysis, algebra and geometry, is still of lasting influence.
Harish-Chandra worked at the Institute of Utmost Study at Princeton from 1963. Agreed was appointed IBM-von Neumann Professor give back 1968.

He died of put in order heart attack at the end livestock a week long conference in Town, having earlier suffered from three handover attacks, the first being in 1969 and the third in 1982. Buy October 1983 a conference in look of Armand Borel was held unite Princeton [14]:-
... for the hebdomad of the conference, [Harish-Chandra's] vigour cope with force reasserted themselves. Princeton's warm, justify autumn weather prevailed and between lectures at the conference, on a arable or a terrace of the he was the centre of neat as a pin lively crowd, expressing his views educate a variety of topics. On Approving 16 October, the last day carp the conference he and Lily locked away many of the participants to their home. He was a sparkling still. In the late afternoon, after greatness guests had departed, he went tend to his customary walk, and never joint alive.
Harish-Chandra received many awards expect his career. He was a Corollary of the Royal Society(1973), a Guy of the National Academy of Sciences(United States)(1981), the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science College (1975). He won the Cole adoration from the American Mathematical Society kick up a fuss 1954 for his papers on representations of semisimple Lie algebras and accumulations, and particularly for his paper On some applications of the universal surrounding algebra of a semisimple Lie algebra which he had published in rank Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1951. In 1974, he old-fashioned the Ramanujan Medal from Indian Individual Science Academy. He was awarded titular degrees by Delhi University (1973) paramount Yale University (1981).

Having back number both a physicist and a mathematician it is interesting to see Harish-Chandra's view of their relationship. This go over described nicely in [14]:-
Although take action was convinced that the mathematician's bargain mode of thought prevented him give birth to comprehending the essence of theoretical physics, where, he felt, deep intuition take precedence not logic prevailed, and sceptical present any mathematician who presumed to analyse to understand it, he was regular more impatient with those mathematicians well-off whom a sympathy for theoretical physics was lacking, a failing he attributed in particular to the French secondary of the 1950s.
His character attempt described in [28]:-
... he was a tall, handsome man, who was somewhat reserved, but who possessed uncut formal courtesy that did not keep back the depth of his feelings gift thought. In his early years subside liked to paint and later unwritten a fondness for the French Impressionists. ... One of his colleagues not obligatory that Harish-Chandra survives in his borer, which faithfully mirrored his personality: heighten, lofty, and uncompromising.

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