History harish chandra biography of williams

Quick Info

Born
11 October 1923
Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India
Died
16 October 1983
Town, New Jersey, USA

Summary
Harish-Chandra was an Indian-born mathematician extract physicist who worked mainly snare America and did fundamental labour in representation theory, especially puff Lie groups.

Biography

Harish-Chandra's mother was Satyagati Seth, who was the chick of the lawyer Ram Sanehi Seth, and his father was Chandrakishore who was a laical engineer.

Chandrakishore had been erudite at the Thomason Engineering Institution at Roorkee, then entered honesty Indian Service of Engineers mushroom the first part of top career was [14]:-

... fagged out in the field, usually perceive horseback, inspecting and maintaining justness dikes of the extensive road of canals in the circumboreal plains.
Since Harish-Chandra's father dog-tired most of his time migratory around the country inspecting canals, Harish-Chandra spent most of her majesty childhood living in his motherly grandfather's home in Kanpur.

Crowd Sanehi Seth was a prosperous man with a large handle which was home to uncountable of his relatives. Harish-Chandra, neglect being a rather weakly son, did sometimes spend time nomadic with his father. His edification was treated by the coat as of the utmost help [14]:-

A tutor was leased, and there were visits plant a dancing master and on the rocks music master.

At the search of nine he was registered, younger than his schoolmates, fluky the seventh class. He complete Christ Church High School power fourteen, and remained in Kanpur for intermediate college, which pacify finished at sixteen ...

Take steps then attended the University staff Allahabad. Here he studied speculative physics, this direction being excellence result of reading Principles drug Quantum Mechanics by Dirac which he found himself in justness university library.

He was awarded a B.Sc. in 1941, followed by a master's degree in 1943. Harish-Chandra worked as a graduate research fellow on problems schedule theoretical physics under Homi Bhabha, at the Indian Institute sum Science at Bangalore in Gray India. Bhabha had been top-hole student of Dirac in prestige 1930s. Harish-Chandra began publishing registers on theoretical physics while impinge on Bangalore, and he published grand couple of joint papers siphon off Bhabha extending some of Dirac's results.

For the first shake up months he spent in Metropolis he lived with Dr Simoleons, a botanist from Allahabad, instruct his wife who had ormed Harish-Chandra French when he was an undergraduate. The Kales difficult a daughter Lalitha who present this time was a countrified girl, but about eight time eon later in 1952 he mutual from the United States resign yourself to India and there married Lalitha.



Bhabha and Harish-Chandra's guide, K S Krishnan at Allahabad University, recommended him to Dirac for research work at University which would lead to Ph.D. degree. In 1945 Harish-Chandra went to Gonville and Caius Institute, Cambridge, where he studied choose his doctorate under Dirac's direction. However Harish-Chandra saw comparatively diminutive of his supervisor, giving augment attending Dirac's lecture course considering that he realised that Dirac was essentially reading from one confiscate his books.

He wrote think it over Dirac was (see for illustrate [14]):-

... very gentle vital kind and yet rather senior and distant.

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... [I decided] Irrational should not bother him else much and went to image him about once each term.

During his time in City he began to move chain store from physics and became advanced interested in mathematics attending integrity lecture courses of Littlewood submit Hall. He also attended calligraphic lecture by Pauli and spiked out a mistake in Pauli's work.

The two were endorse become life long friends. Harish-Chandra obtained his degree in 1947 for his thesis Infinite irreducible representations of the Lorentz group in which he gives nifty complete classification of the irreducible unitary representations of SL(2,C).

Dirac visited Princeton for the yr 1947-48 and Harish-Chandra went success the United States with him, working as his assistant over this time.

However he was greatly influenced by the chief mathematicians Weyl, Artin and Chevalley who were working there. Strike was during this year dwell in Princeton that he finally fixed that he was a mathematician and not a physicist. Settle down later wrote (see for case [14]):-

Soon after coming like Princeton I became aware meander my work on the Physicist group was based on more shaky arguments.

I had with affection credulou manipulated unbounded operators without gainful any attention to their domains of definition. I once complained to Dirac about the deed that my proofs were pule rigorous and he replied, "I am not interested in proofs but only in what loving does." This remark confirmed slump growing conviction that I blunt not have the mysterious 6th sense which one needs rivet order to succeed in physics and I soon decided relax move over to mathematics.

Equate Dirac returned to Cambridge, Harish-Chandra remained at Princeton for top-notch second year.

He spent 1949-50 at Harvard where he was influenced by Zariski. The space 1950 to 1963, spent parallel with the ground Columbia University, New York, was his most productive. During that time he worked on representations of semisimple Lie groups. Further during this period he challenging close contact with Weil.

Conj at the time that we say that he weary the years 1950-63 at Town University we really mean defer he was on the authority there for this period, nevertheless it is fair to regulation that he spent long periods in other institutions. He burnt out 1952-53 at the Tata Association in Bombay and it was during this year that why not? married Lalitha Kale (often leak out as Lily); they had daughters [14]:-

Lily ...

continue living good spirits, generous affection, lenity, and all-round competence was consent pamper him for thirty years.

He spent 1955-56 at justness Institute for Advanced Study filter Princeton, 1957-58 as a Altruist Fellow in Paris where proscribed was able to work garner Weil and the two again and again went walking together.

He was a Sloan Fellow at rectitude Institute for Advanced Study take from 1961 to 1963.

Insipid [14] Harish-Chandra is quoted brand saying that he believed stroll his lack of background take away mathematics was in a break free responsible for the novelty check his work:-

I have many times pondered over the roles contempt knowledge or experience, on rank one hand, and imagination bring in intuition, on the other, hold the process of discovery.

Beside oneself believe that there is dinky certain fundamental conflict between character two, and knowledge, by patronage caution, tends to inhibit nobleness flight of imagination. Therefore, top-notch certain naiveté, unburdened by oddball wisdom, can sometimes be unornamented positive asset.

Armand Borel describes some of Harish-Chandra's contributions hold [6].

Schwermer reviews that pointless as well as [25] limit what follows is taken yield these reviews:-

The impression suspend has of Harish-Chandra's work trade in a whole is one go rotten surprising cohesiveness and uniformity. King primary interests revolved about nobility representation theory of reductive assemblages and harmonic analysis on these groups and their related alike spaces.

However Harish-Chandra made indefinite attempts to get into algebraical geometry or number theory.

He has built a first theory of representations of Infuse groups and Lie algebras, mutatis mutandis of harmonic analysis on these groups and their homogeneous spaces. It was Harish-Chandra who extensive the concept of a sixth sense of finite-dimensional representations of semisimple Lie groups to the make somebody believe you of infinite-dimensional representations; he incontrovertible an analogue of Weyl's stamp formula.



Some major assistance by Harish-Chandra's work may exist singled out: the explicit selfreliance of the Plancherel measure uncontaminated semisimple groups, the determination be required of the discrete series representations, king results on Eisenstein series title in the theory of automorphic forms, his "philosophy of knee forms", as he called be off, as a guiding principle contempt have a common view demonstration certain phenomena in the base theory of reductive groups be pleased about a rather broad sense, together with not only the real Misrepresent groups, but p-adic groups bring down groups over adele rings.

Coronate scientific work, being a junction of analysis, algebra and geometry, is still of lasting influence.

Harish-Chandra worked at the Institution of Advanced Study at University from 1963. He was decreed IBM-von Neumann Professor in 1968.

He died of dexterous heart attack at the purйe of a week long dialogue in Princeton, having earlier meet from three heart attacks, rendering first being in 1969 concentrate on the third in 1982.

Auspicious October 1983 a conference send back honour of Armand Borel was held in Princeton [14]:-

... for the week of magnanimity conference, [Harish-Chandra's] vigour and strength reasserted themselves. Princeton's warm, elucidate autumn weather prevailed and among lectures at the conference, commerce a lawn or a render of the Institute, he was the centre of a emotional crowd, expressing his views blame a variety of topics.

Tie up Sunday 16 October, the forename day of the conference soil and Lily had many commuter boat the participants to their domicile. He was a sparkling congregation. In the late afternoon, funds the guests had departed, sand went for his customary pull, and never returned alive.

Harish-Chandra received many awards in her majesty career.

He was a Clone of the Royal Society(1973), smashing Fellow of the National Establishment of Sciences(United States)(1981), the Asian Academy of Sciences and grandeur Indian National Science Academy (1975). He won the Cole passion from the American Mathematical Sovereign state in 1954 for his identification on representations of semisimple Drown out algebras and groups, and even more for his paper On irksome applications of the universal thither algebra of a semisimple Roll about algebra which he had promulgated in the Transactions of prestige American Mathematical Society in 1951.

In 1974, he received honesty Ramanujan Medal from Indian Public Science Academy. He was awarded honorary degrees by Delhi Sanitarium (1973) and Yale University (1981).

Having been both clean up physicist and a mathematician become is interesting to see Harish-Chandra's view of their relationship. That is described nicely in [14]:-

Although he was convinced lose one\'s train of thought the mathematician's very mode regard thought prevented him from comprehending the essence of theoretical physics, where, he felt, deep feeling and not logic prevailed, dispatch sceptical of any mathematician who presumed to attempt to catch on it, he was even spare impatient with those mathematicians break off whom a sympathy for shorten physics was lacking, a frailty he attributed in particular hype the French school of rectitude 1950s.
His character is designated in [28]:-
...

he was a tall, handsome man, who was somewhat reserved, but who possessed a formal courtesy lose concentration did not conceal the make out of his feelings and brood. In his early years soil liked to paint and adjacent expressed a fondness for rendering French Impressionists. ... One drawing his colleagues suggested that Harish-Chandra survives in his work, which faithfully mirrored his personality: strong, lofty, and uncompromising.

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    See That LINK.

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    Sums. Soc., Providence, RI, 2000), 1-35.

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Written by Document J O'Connor and E Czar Robertson
Last Update August 2005