Ganesh Prasad

Ganesh Prasad (* November 15, 1876 in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, † March 9, 1935 in Agra ) was an Indian mathematician. He is considered one of the fathers of modern mathematical research in India.

Life

Prasad came from a well -to-do Kayastha family. He studied at the Muir Central College, Allahabad ( bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1895 with honors ) and the University of Allahabad and Calcutta University. He received his doctorate at the University of Allahabad (the first Ph.D. of an Indian in Mathematics, Sc. D. 1898). He then taught in Allahabad, among others, on the Muir Central College, before he went to further studies in 1899 at the University of Cambridge, where he studied with Andrew Russell Forsyth, Joseph Larmor, HF Baker and Ernest William Hobson. He took the work On the constitution of matter and the analytical theories of heat on Adams Award contest ( to win without him ), and then studied at the University of Göttingen with Felix Klein, David Hilbert and Arnold Sommerfeld. His Adams Prize essay was published on mediation of small treatises in Göttingen.

In 1904 he returned to India and became a professor at the Muir Central College, Allahabad. A year later Sudhakara Dvivedi entered at Queen's College in Benares to retire and Prasad was sent there as his successor. Since he was the only professor of mathematics there, he had a strong teaching load. In 1914 he became a professor at the University of Calcutta, 1917, he was back in Benares at the university where he organized the teaching of mathematics new. In 1923 he was again professor in Calcutta ( Hardinge Professor of Mathematics ) and remained there until his death at a conference at the University of Agra, which he founded with.

In 1924 he became president of the Calcutta Mathematical Society and Vice President of the Indian Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a founding member of the National Institute of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy later. He was the founder of the Benares Mathematical Society.

He was concerned with potential theory, summability of series and special functions of mathematical physics and wrote a Treatise on spherical harmonics and the functions of Bessel and Lame (via spherical harmonics and Bessel functions). He also wrote a book about mathematicians in the 19th century ( published, of which only the first two of three volumes ).

He was strongly committed to the elementary mathematics education in the country in Uttar Pradesh. He donated from his own fortune on the education of girls and prizes for students at the University of Agra and donated for the universities in Allahabad and Benares.

Among his students AN Singh and BB Datta, the authors of the History of Hindu Mathematics ( two volumes), and BN Prasad ( 1899-1966 ), a trained in Liverpool and Paris analyst, who was professor in Allahabad and founder of the Allahabad Mathematical Society.