Komaravolu Chandrasekharan (1920–2017)

Komaravolu Chandrasekharan was born on November 21, 1920, in Machilipatnam, India. He obtained his M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Madras through Presidency College in 1943 and his Ph.D in 1946. He was a student of Ananda Rau, who worked with Hardy on "Summability" and was a contemporary of Ramanujan in Cambridge. Marshall Stone met Chandrasekharan in Madras and was so impressed by the young man that he arranged for him to go in 1946 to the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, to work as assistant to Hermann Weyl. During his Princeton years, Chandrasekharan had an extensive collaboration with Salomon Bochner, which resulted in papers and a book in analysis centering around Fourier transforms. In 1949 Homi Bhabha, founder of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Bombay, invited him to join the School of Mathematics of TIFR. Chandrasekharan became a full professor there in 1952. The current success of this institute owes a great deal to his skills as an organizer and administrator.