Harish-Chandra
Born: 11 Oct 1923 in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh,
India
Died: 16 Oct 1983 in Princeton, New Jersey,
USA
Harish-Chandra attended school in Kanpur, then attended the University of Allahabad. Here he studied theoretical physics, this direction being the result of studying Principles of Quantum Mechanics by Dirac. He was awarded a master's degree in 1943 and then he went to Bangalore to work further on theoretical physics.
After a short while Harish-Chandra went to Cambridge where he studied for his Ph.D. under Dirac's supervision. During his time in Cambridge he moved away from physics and became more interested in mathematics. While at Cambridge he attended a lecture by Pauli and pointed out a mistake in Pauli's work. The two were to become life long friends. Harish-Chandra obtained his degree in 1947 and, the same year, he went to the USA.
Dirac visited Princeton for one year and Harish-Chandra worked as his assistant during this time. However he was greatly influenced by Weyl and Chevalley. The period 1950 to 1963 was his most productive and he spent these years at the Columbia University. During this time he worked on representations of semisimple Lie groups. Also during this period he had close contact with Weil.
In [4] Harish-Chandra is quoted as saying that he believed that his lack of background in mathematics was in a way responsible for the novelty of his work:-
I have often pondered over the roles of knowledge or experience, on the one hand, and imagination or intuition, on the other, in the process of discovery. I believe that there is a certain fundamental conflict between the two, and knowledge, by advocating caution, tends to inhibit the flight of imagination. Therefore, a certain naiveté, unburdened by conventional wisdom, can sometimes be a positive asset.
Harish-Chandra worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from 1963. He was appointed IBM-von Neumann Professor in 1968.
He died of a heart attack at the end of a week long conference in Princeton, having earlier suffered from three heart attacks.
Harish-Chandra received many awards in his career. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. He won the Cole prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1954 for his papers on representations of semisimple Lie algebras and groups, and particularly for his paper On some applications of the universal enveloping algebra of a semisimple Lie algebra which he had published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1951. In 1974, he received the Ramanujan Medal from Indian National Science Academy.