A profound mathematician-physicist

Alladi Ramakrishnan, about whom a book has recently been released, belonged to a small but eminent group of Indian mathematical physicists who worked closely with Chandrasekara V. Raman, Homi J. Bhabha, and Prasanta C. Mahalanobis and contributed significantly to theoretical physics, in Madras.

Ramakrishnan, born in 1923 in Madras, was the son of Justice Alladi Krishnaswami, the eminent Madras jurist. Ramakrishnan’s illustrious career in mathematical physics began in 1947; during his lifetime, he wrote more than 150 scientific papers in leading journals on topics ranging over Stochastic Process, Elementary Particle Physics, Matrix Algebra, and the Special Theory of Relativity. He also regularly and lectured as a visitor at leading scientific institutions in the United States, Europe and Japan.

In 1947, he joined what was then the fledgling Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, whose Director was Homi J. Bhabha. Bhabha introduced the young Ramakrishnan to Cascade Theory and the Fluctuation Problem of Cosmic Radiation, which led to Ramakrishnan inventing the correlation densities, which he called Product Densities, a terminology current even today. In 1949, he went to England to do his PhD with M.S. Bartlett at the University of Manchester. On his return to India, he joined the University of Madras.

When Ramakrishnan was on the academic staff of the University, he was transferred to the extension centre in Madurai in 1959. He frequently travelled to Madras from there on his own account and held a series of theoretical physics seminars at his family home, Ekamra Nivas, in Mylapore, which persons of global eminence, such as Niels Bohr, Mohammed Abdus Salam, Murray Gell-Mann and Vladimir Jurko Glaser, addressed stimulating the minds of the young and the old interested in theoretical physics, in Madras.

In 1960, the physicist Niels Bohr, NL*, visited India as the guest of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. When Nehru asked him what his impressions about science in India were, Bohr pointed to two significant contributions: (1) Bhabha’s dream institute – the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, and (2) the small group of students under the tutelage of Alladi Ramakrishnan in Madras.

Impressed with his scholarliness, Nehru supported Ramakrishnan’s plan to create an institute solely dedicated to the study of mathematical sciences on the lines of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The late
C. Subramaniam, Education Minister in the Kamaraj Ministry, played a key role in the establishment of the Institute (popularly known as the Matscience Institute), which was born in 1962. Subramanian Chandrasekhar, NL*, inaugurated it in the Presidency College in Madras.

A profound mathematician-physicist, Ramakrishnan was avidly interested in attracting young minds. By speaking on the foundations of theoretical physics in schools and colleges, Ramakrishnan fulfilled his desire. During the Einstein centenary celebrations in Madras, I had the pleasure of listening to Ramakrsihnan, who spoke on the theories of relativity with extraordinary mastery, presenting the complex ideas in simple English, intelligible even to a person such as me. He revelled in, until his end, finding new ways of understanding and presenting principles of complex subjects such as relativity. Ramakrishnan died in Florida in 2008.

Ramakrishnan’s article on probability and stochastic processes in Handbuch der Physik (Springer Verlag, Germany, 1958) is an insightful treatment, which triggered applications in diverse fields of physical, biological and other sciences. He wrote Elementary Particles and Cosmic Rays (Pergamon Press, UK, 1962), L-Matrix Theory or the Grammar of Dirac Matrices (Tata McGraw Hill, India, 1972) and Special Theory of Relativity (EastWest Books, India).

* NL = Nobel Laureate