About Harish ChandraHarish-Chandra FRS (Harish Chandra Mehrotra; 11 October 1923 – 16 October 1983) was an Indian American mathematician and physicist who did fundamental work in representation theory, especially harmonic analysis on semisimple Lie groups.
Early life
Harish-Chandra was born in Kanpur (then Cawnpore), British India. He was educated at B.N.S.D. College, Kanpur, and at the University of Allahabad. After receiving his masters degree in Physics in 1943, he moved to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for further studies in theoretical physics and worked with Homi J. Bhabha.
In 1945, he moved to University of Cambridge, Cambridge and worked as a research student under Paul Dirac. While at Cambridge, he attended lectures by Wolfgang Pauli, and during one of them pointed out a mistake in Pauli's work. The two were to become lifelong friends. During this time he became increasingly interested in mathematics. At Cambridge he obtained his PhD in 1947.
When Dirac visited Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, U.S.A. in 1947/48 he brought Harish-Chandra as his assistant. It was at this stage that Harish-Chandra decided to change over from physics to mathematics. He was a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey from 1963. From 1968, until his death in 1983, he was IBM von Neumann Professor in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. He died of a heart attack while on an evening walk on October 16, 1983, during a conference in Princeton in honour of Armand Borel's 60th birthday. A similar conference for his 60th birthday, scheduled for the following year, instead became a memorial conference. He is survived by his wife, Lalitha (Lily), and his daughters Premala (Premi), and Devaki.
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