Harish Chandra was born on 11 October 1923 in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh.
He attended school in Kanpur and then the University of Allahabad, where he studied theoretical physics.
After obtaining his master’s degree in 1943 he joined the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore to work further with Homi Bhabha on theoretical physics.
Harish Chandra
Dr. Bhabha arranged for Harish Chandra to go to Cambridge to work for his Ph.D. under the legendary Paul Dirac.
In 1947 Dirac visited Princeton for one year and Harish Chandra worked as his assistant during this time.
The great French mathematician Chevalley greatly influenced Harish Chandra. He gave up physics altogether and taking up mathematics.
Professional Life and Research Work
Soon Harish moved to Columbia University after his year at Princeton.
In 1963, Harish Chandra was invited to become a permanent member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton.
The IBM appointed him Von Neumann Professor in 1968.
Soon Harish Chandra received many awards in his career. He was a Fellow of both the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy.
In 1974, he received the Ramanujan Medal from Indian National Science Academy.
The Royal Society elected him Fellow in 1954. The American Mathematical Society awarded him the Cole prize in 1954.
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.
He made profound contributions to the representation theory of Lie groups, harmonic analysis.
Harish Chandra was also a recipient of the Indian civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan in 1977.
He was a member of the(NAS) National Academy of Sciences of the U.S. and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He was the recipient of the Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society, in 1954.
Later the Indian National Science Academy honoured him with the Srinivasa Ramanujan Medal in 1974.
In 1981, he received an honorary degree from Yale University.
He died on 16 October 1983 in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.
