Rajagopalan Parthasarathy is 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 ...
who specialised in
representation theory
Representation theory is a branch of mathematics that studies abstract algebraic structures by ''representing'' their elements as linear transformations of vector spaces, and studies modules over these abstract algebraic structures. In essen ...
of
Lie group
In mathematics, a Lie group (pronounced ) is a group that is also a differentiable manifold. A manifold is a space that locally resembles Euclidean space, whereas groups define the abstract concept of a binary operation along with the addit ...
s and
algebra
Algebra () is one of the areas of mathematics, broad areas of mathematics. Roughly speaking, algebra is the study of mathematical symbols and the rules for manipulating these symbols in formulas; it is a unifying thread of almost all of mathem ...
s.
He was awarded in 1985 the
Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology
The Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (SSB) is a science award in India given annually by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) for notable and outstanding research, applied or fundamental, in biology, ...
, the highest science award in
India
India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...
, in the mathematical sciences category.
Prof. Parthasarathy is an expert in representation theory of semisimple Lie groups. His initial work was on the realization of the so-called discrete series of representations of a semisimple Lie group in the space of Dirac Spinors. He made considerable progress in many central problems in representation theory. His work on the resolution of the
Blattner's conjecture In mathematics, Blattner's conjecture or Blattner's formula is a description of the discrete series representations of a general semisimple group ''G'' in terms of their restricted representations to a maximal compact subgroup ''K'' (their so-called ...
and the question of unitarisability of certain highest weight modules are significant contributions to this area in mathematics.
References
External links
Indian National Science Academy database
1945 births
Living people
20th-century Indian mathematicians
Recipients of the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Mathematical Science
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