D. R. Kaprekar

Dattathreya Ramachandra Kaprekar ( born January 17, 1905 in Dahanu near Bombay, † 1986 Devlali, Maharashtra, India) was an Indian mathematician who discovered the eponymous Kaprekar numbers and Kaprekar constants and other results in the field of number theory.

Life

Kaprekar was in Dahanu, a village near Bombay, the son of an official who was a lover of astrology. He graduated from the secondary school in Thane and a college in Pune. After earning a BA from the University of Mumbai in 1929, he did not lead further his studies and worked throughout his professional life from 1930 to 1962 as a school teacher in Nashik in Maharashtra. He has published numerous articles on Magic Squares and integers with special properties.

Kaprekar worked mainly on its own, and his ideas were not taken seriously at the beginning of mathematicians in India. However, he gained international fame when Martin Gardner published an article about it in Scientific American in 1975. In addition to that he discovered and named after him Kaprekar numbers and Kaprekar constants he also described the so-called Devlali numbers and Harshad numbers.