Cadambur Tiruvenkatachari Rajagopal (8 September 1903 – 25 April 1978) was an Indian

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

Biography

Rajagopal was born in

Triplicane Thiruvallikeni known as Triplicane, is one of the oldest neighbourhoods of Chennai, India. It is situated on the Bay of Bengal coast and about from Fort St George. The average elevation of the neighbourhood is 14 metres above Mean sea leve ...

Madras Chennai, also known as Madras ( its official name until 1996), is the capital and largest city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India. It is located on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal. According to the 2011 Indian ce ...

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

. He was the first son of Tiruvenkatachari and Padmammal. He had two younger brothers, C.T. Venugopal, a distinguished civil servant, and C. T. K. Chari. They also had a young sister, Kamala. He studied at Presidency College and graduated with an Honours in mathematics in 1925. He was involved in the clerical service and then taught mathematics at

Annamalai University The Annamalai University (AU) is a public state university in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India. The sprawling campus offers courses of higher education in arts, science, engineering, management, humanities, agriculture, and physical education. ...

. Rajagopal taught mathematics at

Madras Christian College Madras Christian College (MCC) is a liberal arts and sciences college in Chennai, India. Founded in 1837, MCC is one of Asia's oldest extant colleges. The college is affiliated to the University of Madras but functions as an autonomous institut ...

from 1931 to 1951. He joined the Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics in 1951. Collaborating on the teaching of

conic section A conic section, conic or a quadratic curve is a curve obtained from a cone's surface intersecting a plane. The three types of conic section are the hyperbola, the parabola, and the ellipse; the circle is a special case of the ellipse, tho ...

s, Rajagopal and Vaniyambadi Rajagopala Srinivasaraghavan wrote a

textbook A textbook is a book containing a comprehensive compilation of content in a branch of study with the intention of explaining it. Textbooks are produced to meet the needs of educators, usually at educational institutions, but also of learners ( ...

, ''An Introduction to Analytical Conics'', that was published in 1955 by

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in India. A reviewer noted "a pleasing feature is the frequent reference to the history of the subject", and "the authors pursue the theory in great detail, proving a large number of subsidiary results." Rajagopal became director of the Ramanujan Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics in 1955. He helped the Institute to become India's leading mathematics research centre. The Institute is now associated with the

University of Madras The University of Madras is a public university, public State university (India), state university in Chennai (Madras), Tamil Nadu, India. Established in 1857, it is one of the oldest and most prominent universities in India, incorporated by an ...

, after it was merged with the Department of Mathematics at the university in 1967. Rajagopal conducted research on sequences, series, summability, and published more than 80 papers but is most noted for his work in the area of generalising and unifying

Tauberian theorems In mathematics, Abelian and Tauberian theorems are theorems giving conditions for two methods of summing divergent series to give the same result, named after Niels Henrik Abel and Alfred Tauber. The original examples are Abel's theorem showing th ...

. He also did research in many other mathematical topics. Rajagopal also conducted research in the history of medieval Indian mathematics. He showed that the series for arctan x discovered by James Gregory and those for sin x and cos x discovered by

Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton () was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author. Newton was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment that followed ...

were known to the Hindu mathematicians 150 years earlier. He identified Madhava as the first discoverer of these series.

Works

* 1949: (with M.S. Rangachari) "A Neglected Chapter of Hindu Mathematics",

Scripta Mathematica ''Scripta Mathematica'' was a quarterly journal published by Yeshiva University devoted to the Philosophy, history, and expository treatment of mathematics. It was said to be, at its time, "the only mathematical magazine in the world edited by spe ...

15: 201–9 * 1951: (with M.S. Rangachari) "On the Hindu proof of Gregory's series", ''Scripta Mathematica'' 17: 65–74. * 1949: (with A. Venkataraman) "The sine and cosine

power series In mathematics, a power series (in one variable) is an infinite series of the form \sum_^\infty a_n \left(x - c\right)^n = a_0 + a_1 (x - c) + a_2 (x - c)^2 + \dots where ''a_n'' represents the coefficient of the ''n''th term and ''c'' is a co ...

in Hindu mathematics", ''Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal (Science)'' 15: 1–13. * 1955: (with V. R. Srinivasaraghavan
Introduction to Analytical Conics
via

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* 1977/8: (with M. S. Rangachari) "An Untapped Source of Medieval Keralese Mathematics", ''Archive for History of Exact Sciences'' 18(2): 89–102. * 1986: (with M.S Rangachari) "On Medieval Kerala Mathematics"

Archive for History of Exact Sciences ''Archive for History of Exact Sciences'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal currently published bimonthly by Springer Science+Business Media, covering the history of mathematics and of astronomy observations and techniques, epistemology of scien ...

35: 91–99

References

External links

*
Published papers archived on JSTOR
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rajagopal, Cadambur Tiruvenkatachari 1903 births 1978 deaths 20th-century Indian mathematicians Scientists from Chennai

Biography

Works

See also

References

External links