Harish Chandra

Harish Chandra

Shri Harish Chandra was born on 11th October 1923, in Kanpur. He did his graduation from the University of Allahabad and studied theoretical physics, which directed him to study Paul Dirac’s thesis on quantum mechanics. In 1943, he obtained a master’s degree and went to Bangalore to work further on theoretical physics. After some time, Harish Chandra went to Cambridge, and there he studied Ph.D. under Dirac’s supervision. During his time in Cambridge, he moved apart from physics and became more interested in mathematics. Harish Chandra once attended a lecture by Pauliat Cambridge and pointed out a mistake in Pauli’s work. Soon, the two became lifelong friends. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1947 and went to the USA the same year. Dirac visited Princeton for one year, and during the time Harish Chandra worked as his assistant. He was also greatly influenced by other mathematicians such as Hermann Weyl and Claude Chevalley. The period from 1950-1963 was the most productive period of his life, and he spent those years at Columbia University. During the time, he worked on representations of semisimple Lie groups and also had close contact with Andre Weil. Harish Chandra received many awards during his career. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and also a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1954, he had won the Cole Prize from the American Mathematical Society for his papers on representations of semisimple Lie algebras and groups. In 1974. He was also honoured with the Srinivasa Ramanujan Medal from the Indian National Science Academy. He passed away on 16th October 1983, due to a heart attack.

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