The Hindu : National : King Faizal prize for M.S. Narasimhan

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 05, 2006

National

National

King Faizal prize for M.S. Narasimhan

S. Ramanan

The acclaimed mathematician's contributions are profoundly original

Professor Mudumbai Seshachalu Narasimhan

Chennai: From a childhood in the tiny village of Tandarai in the erstwhile North Arcot district of Tamil Nadu, commuting to school on a bullock-cart, to an internationally acclaimed mathematician is quite a transformation. To M.S. Narasimhan, honours and awards come by the handful, without seeking or lobbying. To the Bhatnagar award, the titles of Padma Bhushanand Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Merite, the Third World Academy award and the Fellowship of the Royal Society, he has added one more prize — the King Faizal International prize for 2006. The awardees of the King Faizal International prize are English mathematician Simon Donaldson and Prof. Narasimhan. Prof. Narasimhan's contributions to differential geometry and algebraic geometry such as his collaborative work with S. Ramanan on the "Existence of universal connections" and with C.S. Seshadri on "Unitary and stable bundles," and excursions into differential equations, representation theory and mathematical physics are characterised by profound originality. He has collaborated with a large number of mathematicians all over the world.

His interest in mathematics was kindled by a well-informed and kindly professor at Loyola College, Chennai, where he had his undergraduate education. Fr. Racine, a French Jesuit missionary, was himself a student of the great geometer Elie Cartan, but more important was his awareness of contemporary mathematical research and his ability to spot talent.

Prof. Narasimhan is one of the principal leaders responsible for developing the school of mathematics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental research into a leading centre of mathematical research. Besides doing research, he has trained a whole generation of students which has distinguished itself.

It is a truism that any deeply intellectual activity in one field of science will sooner or later make its impact on other disciplines. So it was with Prof. Narasimhan's mathematical research, which proved useful in fields such as Gauge theory and conformal field theory in physics, even if many of the results were obtained purely from the point of view of mathematical aesthetics.

Although in his later years, Prof. Narasimhan did work out a physics-mathematics dictionary in his mind and profited from physical motivation, to this day he does not claim to understand theoretical physics. If his direct research output meets the highest touchstone of mathematical elegance and impacts on neighbouring fields, his contributions by way of organisation of research, particularly in the Third World, are of the greatest importance. As the first Chairman of the National Board for Higher Mathematics, the chief funding agency for research in higher mathematics, he served to set up schemes and procedures, besides playing a supportive role in mathematical education. He was president of the International Union's Commission on Development and Exchange, and in this capacity, he was helpful in the disbursal of funds for Third World mathematical development. He was the head of the mathematics section of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics, established in Trieste, Italy, by Nobel laureate Abdus Salam.

At the personal level, like his mentor Laurent Schwartz, known for his theory of distributions, Prof. Narasimhan is also sympathetic to the proletariat. He enjoys listening to classical music, and his wife, Sakuntala, is proficient is both Carnatic and Hindustani styles. He is also interested in Tamil literature, both classical and contemporary.

(Prof. S. Ramanan retired as a Distinguished Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Chennai Mathematical Institute.)

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