Harish-Chandra - Definition

See Harishchandra for the character in Hindu mythology

Harish-Chandra (11 October 1923-16 October 1983) was an Indian mathematician, who did fundamental work in representation theory. He was born in Kanpur, India and died in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. His education at the University of Allahabad was in physics. He came to University of Cambridge as a research student of Paul Dirac, finishing a doctorate in 1947.

He then moved to the USA, where he was at Columbia University from 1950 to 1963. During this period he established as his special area the study of the discrete series representations of semisimple Lie groups - which are the closest analogue of the Peter-Weyl theory in the non-compact case. The methods were formidable and inductive, using Lie group decompositions.

He is also known for work with Armand Borel founding the theory of arithmetic groups; and for papers on finite group analogues.

He was a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey.

External link

MacTutor biography (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Harish-Chandra.html)