P.C. Mahalanobis

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (29 June 1893 – 28 June 1972) was a renowned Indian scientist and statistician. As a key member of India’s first Planning Commission, he played a major role in shaping the country’s development plans after independence. He is best known for introducing the Mahalanobis distance, an important concept in statistics. 

He also made important contributions to anthropometry—the study of human body measurements—in India. Mahalanobis was the founder of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) and helped design methods for conducting large-scale surveys. Due to his phenomenal work, he is often called the Father of Indian Statistics.

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Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao

Prof. Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao (10 September 1920 – 22 August 2023) was a highly respected Indian-American mathematician and statistician. He served as Professor Emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. 

Over the years, he received numerous awards, honorary degrees, and was celebrated with academic events in his honor. In 2002, he was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science.

The American Statistical Association called him a “living legend,” acknowledging his wide-ranging influence in fields like economics, medicine, anthropology, genetics, national planning, and more. 

In 2023, he received the prestigious International Prize in Statistics, often compared to the Nobel Prize in statistics. He was also actively involved in public health as a senior advisor to the Indian Heart Association, working to raise awareness about heart disease in South Asians.

The Times of India listed him among the top 10 Indian scientists of all time—a true icon in the world of data and numbers.

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D. R. Kaprekar

Dattatreya Ramchandra Kaprekar (17 January 1905 – 1986) was a self-taught Indian mathematician who made a name for himself in the world of recreational mathematics. Even though he worked as a schoolteacher and had no formal postgraduate education, his passion for numbers led him to discover many interesting patterns in mathematics.

Kaprekar introduced several special types of numbers, such as Kaprekar numbers, Harshad numbers, and self numbers (also called Devlali numbers). One of his most famous discoveries is Kaprekar’s constant, which is named in his honor.

He studied in Thane and later at Fergusson College in Pune, where he won the Wrangler R. P. Paranjpye Mathematical Prize in 1927 for his original contribution. Working mostly on his own, Kaprekar explored number theory deeply and also created unique forms of magic squares, including one inspired by the Copernicus magic square.

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Satyendranath Bose

Satyendra Nath Bose (1 January 1894 – 4 February 1974) was a renowned Indian physicist and mathematician, well-known for his groundbreaking work in quantum mechanics during the early 1920s. His work laid the foundation for what we now call Bose–Einstein statistics and led to the development of the Bose–Einstein condensate theory.

He excelled in academics and consistently ranked first, with Meghnad Saha, who later became a famous astrophysicist, coming in second. He drew great inspiration from prominent teachers like Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray, and Naman Sharma, who encouraged him to pursue excellence. 

In recognition of his contributions to science, Bose was honored as a Fellow of the Royal Society and received the Padma Vibhushan—India’s second-highest civilian award—in 1954.

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Narendra Karamkar

Narendra Krishna Karmarkar, born around 1956, is a well-known Indian mathematician who made a major contribution to the field of linear programming. He is most famous for inventing Karmarkar’s algorithm, one of the first polynomial-time algorithms that solved linear programming problems using an interior point method. 

Karmarkar introduced this algorithm in 1984 while working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.  He also taught as a mathematics professor at MIT in 1991 and spent time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1996. From 1998 to 2005, he held the position of Homi Bhabha Chair Professor at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai.

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Radhanath Sikdar 

Radhanath Sikdar (5 October 1813 – 17 May 1870) was a brilliant Indian mathematician, best known for being the first person to calculate the height of Mount Everest in 1852. His exceptional talent in mathematics earned him international recognition. 

In 1864, two years after his retirement, the Bavarian branch of the German Philosophical Society for Natural Science made him a Corresponding Member in his honor. Sikdar passed away on 17 May 1870 in Chandernagore, where he was laid to rest at the Sacred Heart Cemetery.

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Harish-Chandra

Harish-Chandra Mehrotra (11 October 1923 – 16 October 1983) was a renowned Indian-American mathematician and physicist. He made significant contributions to representation theory, particularly in harmonic analysis on semisimple Lie groups.

He was born in Kanpur and studied at B.N.S.D. College and later at the University of Allahabad. After completing his master’s degree in physics in 1940, he joined the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore to continue his studies under the guidance of Homi J. Bhabha.

Throughout his career, Harish-Chandra earned wide recognition. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1954, he was honored with the Cole Prize by the American Mathematical Society for his outstanding work.

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Ganesh Prasad

Ganesh Prasad (15 November 1876 – 9 March 1935) was a well-known Indian mathematician who made important contributions to various areas such as the theory of potentials, real functions, Fourier series, and surface theory. He studied at the famous Universities of Cambridge and Göttingen, where he received advanced mathematical training.

After returning to India in 1904, he became a mathematics professor at Muir Central College in Allahabad. Ganesh Prasad played a key role in promoting mathematical research in India, earning him the title “Father of Mathematical Research in India”. 

To know about Ganesh Prasad, read here.