HARISH-CHANDRA BIRTH CENTENARY LECTURE SERIES

The Department of Mathematics and Statistics is organizing a semester-long program starting from September 2023 and ending in March 2024, celebrating Harish-Chandra's birth centenary in which several series of lectures on the contribution of Harish-Chandra to representation theory, harmonic analysis, number theory and related areas will be given by some eminent speakers.

BIOGRAPHY OF HARISH CHANDRA.

Harish-Chandra was born on 11 October, 1923 in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. He attended school in Kanpur and after receiving his master's degree in Physics, from the University of Allahabad in 1943, he moved to the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore to work with Homi Bhabha.  After a short while, he went to Cambridge, where he wrote his PhD thesis on the "Infinite Irreducible Representations of the Lorentz Group" under the supervision of Paul A.M. Dirac. During his time in Cambridge, he moved away from physics, and became more interested in mathematics. Harish-Chandra obtained his PhD degree in 1947 and in the same year he went to USA where he stayed until the end of his life.

In 1950 he went to Columbia University, where he remained until 1963, when he was offered a permanent position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.  During his stay at the United states, the leading mathematicians Hermann Weyl, Emil Artin and Claude Chevalley who were also working there had a great impact on him.

He became one of the leading mathematicians of the twentieth century and died on 16 October, 1983 due to a heart attack while participating in a conference in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. 

Dr. Harish-Chandra was one of the most outstanding mathematicians of his generation and he is one of those responsible for transforming the infinite dimensional representation theory of semisimple Lie groups from a very modest topic on the periphery of mathematics and physics into a very major field central to contemporary mathematics.

Harish-Chandra also received many eminent awards, including the AMS Cole Prize in Algebra (1954), Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (1954), Fellow of the Royal Society (1973), AMS Colloquium Lecturer (1969), Ramanujan Medal from the Indian National Science Academy (1974), honorary degrees by Delhi University 1973 and Yale University (1981), and also Fellow of the National Academy of the Sciences (United States) 1981. He was also the recipient of Padma Bhushan in 1977.

The impression one has of Harish-Chandra's work as a whole is one of surprising cohesiveness and uniformity. His primary interests revolved about the representation theory of reductive groups and harmonic analysis on these groups and their related homogeneous spaces (however, Harish-Chandra also made several attempts to get into algebraic geometry and number theory). It was Harish-Chandra who extended the concept of the character of finite-dimensional representations of semisimple Lie groups to the case of infinite-dimensional representations; he proved an analogue of Weyl's character formula.

Some major contributions by Harish-Chandra's work may be singled out: the explicit determination of the Plancherel measure for semisimple groups, the determination of the discrete series representations, the subquotient theorem, the Harish-Chandra isomorphism, his results on Eisenstein series and in the theory of automorphic forms, his "philosophy of cusp forms", as he called it, as a guiding principle to have a common view of certain phenomena in the representation theory of reductive groups in a rather broad sense, including not only real Lie groups, but p-adic groups or groups over adele rings. His scientific work, being a synthesis of analysis, algebra and geometry, is still of lasting influence.

SPEAKERS

Vyjayanthi Chari, U.C. Riverside. (September 18-20)

Dipendra Prasad, IIT Bombay. (November 19-23)

Jan Frahm, Aarhus university. (December 11-17)

Siddharth Sahi, Rutgers University. (December 24-29)

Uri Onn, Australian National University. (January 14-21)

Apoorva Khare, IISc Bangalore. (January 30-February 2)

M. S. Raghunathan, CBS Mumbai. (February 26-March 1)

Chetan T. Balwe, IISER Mohali. (March 4-March 8)

Swagato Ray, ISI Kolkata. (April 17-April 20)

T. N. Venkataramana, TIFR Mumbai.

C. S. Rajan, Asoka University.

Stéphanie Cupit-Foutou, Ruhr Universität Bochum.

Sandeep Verma, TIFR Mumbai.

Anthony Joseph, Weizmann Institute of Sciences*.

*TO BE CONFIRMED

Timeline: September, 2023-March, 2024.

Schedule to be updated. 

SUPPORTED BY DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND STATISTICS, IIT-KANPUR AND NATIONAL BOARD FOR HIGHER MATHEMATICS. 

Contact: SANTOSHA KUMAR PATTANAYAK

EMAIL: santosha@iitk.ac.in