Ramaswamy S. Vaidyanathaswamy (1894–1960) was an Indian mathematician who wrote the first textbook of

point-set topology In mathematics, general topology (or point set topology) is the branch of topology that deals with the basic set-theoretic definitions and constructions used in topology. It is the foundation of most other branches of topology, including differ ...

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 is notable for having been the first to discover the generalisation of the crystallographic restriction theorem to arbitrary dimensions.

Life

He was born in India on 24 October 1894. Vaidyanathaswamy studied Mathematics at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

in Scotland, under Prof Edmund Taylor Whittaker graduating around 1914. He then did postgraduate studies at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

under Prof H. F. Baker. After his return to India, he was a professor at 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 ...

, and after his retirement was associated with the

Indian Statistical Institute The Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) is a public research university headquartered in Kolkata, India with centers in New Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Tezpur. It was declared an Institute of National Importance by the Government of India und ...

Calcutta Kolkata, also known as Calcutta (List of renamed places in India#West Bengal, its official name until 2001), is the capital and largest city of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of West Bengal. It lies on the eastern ba ...

. He contributed extensively to

, and wrote a well-known textbook on the subject (and the first such textbook published in India), "Set Topology", which was first published in 1947. A second edition, published in 1960, was reprinted by

Dover Publications Dover Publications, also known as Dover Books, is an American book publisher founded in 1941 by Hayward and Blanche Cirker. It primarily reissues books that are out of print from their original publishers. These are often, but not always, book ...

in 1999.
/sup> He was elected a fellow of the

Royal Society of Edinburgh The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was establis ...

in 1924. His proposers were Herbert Westren Turnbull, Edmund Taylor Whittaker, Ralph Allan Sampson and James Hartley Ashworth. He was president of the Indian Mathematical Society from 1940 to 1942.

Selected publications

* *

References

Welcome to University of Madras
20th-century Indian mathematicians Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1894 births 1960 deaths Presidents of the Indian Mathematical Society Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Expatriates from British India in the United Kingdom {{asia-mathematician-stub