K Chandrasekharan

Komaravolu Chandrasekharan was born on 21 November 1920 in Machilipatnam in modernday Andhra Pradesh He attended District Board School in Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh, and then High School at Bapatla, also in Guntur He then obtained his MA in Mathematics from the Presidency College, Chennai and was a Research Scholar in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Madras during 19401943 During 194346 he was a parttime Lecturer at Presidency College and obtained his PhD during this time under Ananda Rau, who was with Ramanujan in Cambridge Chandrasekharan then went to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA
In 1949, while he was in Princeton, he was invited by Homi Bhabha to join the School of Mathematics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research An extraordinarily gifted organiser and administrator of science, he transformed the fledgling School of Mathematics of TIFR into a centre of excellence respected the world over He initiated a very successful programme of recruitment and training of Research Scholars at TIFR The programme continues to this day along the same lines that he set down He put to excellent use his contacts with the leading mathematicians of the world, persuading many of them (like L Schwartz, a Fields medalist, and CL Siegel) to visit TIFR and deliver courses of lectures over periods of two months and more The lecture notes prepared out of these lectures and published by TIFR enjoy a great reputation in the world mathematics community to this day During 195561, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) He served as the Secretary of IMU during 196166 and as President during 197174 His initiatives over a long period of 24 years on this Committee were numerous and valued greatly He served as the Vice President of the International Council of Scientific Unions during 196366 and as its Secretary General during 196670 He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Cabinet, Government of India during 196166 He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1959, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 1963 and the Ramanujan Medal in 1966 He was responsible for the IMU sponsoring the International Mathematical Colloquium held every 4 years at the Tata Institute starting 1956 In 1957 on his initiative, TIFR published the Notebooks of Srinivasa Ramanujan In the fifties, Chandrasekharan held the editorship of the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society Thanks to his abilities at persuading some of the great names in the field to publish there, several great papers appeared in the journal during this period
In 1965 he left TIFR and moved to Eidgerossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich He worked in the fields of number theory and summability His mathematical achievements are first rate, but his contribution to Indian mathematics has been even greater