Harish-Chandra

Harish-Chandra (né Harishchandra) FRS (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. Harish-Chandra was born in Kanpur. He was educated at B.N.S.D. College, Kanpur and at the University of Allahabad. After receiving his master's degree in physics in 1940, he moved to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore for further studies under Homi J. Bhabha. In 1945, he moved to University of Cambridge, and worked as a research student under Paul Dirac. While at Cambridge, he attended lectures by Wolfgang Pauli, and during one of them, Harish-Chandra pointed out a mistake in Pauli's work. The two became lifelong friends. During this time he became increasingly interested in mathematics. He obtained his PhD, Infinite Irreducible Representations of the Lorentz Group, at Cambridge in 1947 under Dirac. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society.