Harish-Chandra

Harish-Chandra Mehrotra

Harish-Chandra Mehrotra was born in Kanpur.^[7] He was educated at B.N.S.D. College, Kanpur and at the University of Allahabad.^[8] After receiving his master's degree in physics in 1940, he moved to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for further studies under Homi J. Bhabha.^{[citation needed]}

In 1945, he moved to University of Cambridge, and worked as a research student under Paul Dirac.^[8] While at Cambridge, he attended lectures by Wolfgang Pauli, and during one of them, Mehrotra pointed out a mistake in Pauli's work. The two became lifelong friends. During this time he became increasingly interested in mathematics. He obtained his PhD, Infinite Irreducible Representations of the Lorentz Group, at Cambridge in 1947 under Dirac.^[4]

Honors and awards

He was a member of the

The mathematics department of V.S.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.^[citation needed]

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.

He was also a recipient of the Padma Bhushan in 1977.^[9]

Death

Starting in 1969, Mehrotra began to experience heart attacks. A second and third heart attack occurred in 1970 and 1982, respectively. From then, his physical capabilities began to decline. A fourth heart attack occurred in 1983, leaving him mostly bedridden and in isolation. On the day after a conference organized for him and mathematician Armand Borel took place, Mehrotra died from his final heart attack.^[10]

References

Publications

• Harish-Chandra (1968), Mars, J. G. M. (ed.), Automorphic forms on semisimple Lie groups, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol. 62, Berlin, New York:
  S2CID 118891017
• Harish-Chandra (1970),
  MR 0414797
• Harish-Chandra (1984), Varadarajan, V. S. (ed.), Collected papers. Vol. I. 1944–1954., Berlin, New York:
  MR 0726025
• Harish-Chandra (1984), Varadarajan, V. S. (ed.), Collected papers. Vol. II 1955–1958., Berlin, New York:
  MR 0726025
• Harish-Chandra (1984), Varadarajan, V. S. (ed.), Collected papers. Vol. III 1959–1968., Berlin, New York:
  MR 0726025
• Harish-Chandra (1984), Varadarajan, V. S. (ed.), Collected papers. Vol. IV 1970–1983., Berlin, New York:
  MR 0726025
• Harish-Chandra (1999), DeBacker, Stephen; Sally, Paul J. (eds.), Admissible invariant distributions on reductive p-adic groups, University Lecture Series, vol. 16, Providence, R.I.:
  MR 1702257

Bibliography

• Doran, Robert S.; Varadarajan, V. S., eds. (2000), "The mathematical legacy of Harish-Chandra", Proceedings of the AMS Special Session on Representation Theory and Noncommutative Harmonic Analysis, held in memory of Harish-Chandra on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of his birth, in Baltimore, MD, January 9–10, 1998, Proceedings of Symposia in Pure Mathematics, vol. 68, Providence, R.I.:
  MR 1767886
• Srivastava, R. S. L. (1986), "About Harish Chandra", Gaṇita Bhãrati. Indian Society for History of Mathematics. Bulletin, 8 (1): 42–43,
  MR 0888666
• Varadarajan, V. S. (2003), "Harish-Chandra", Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography

External links

• Quotations related to Harish-Chandra at Wikiquote
• Biography by Roger Howe

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