K. Ananda Rau

K. Ananda Rau ( born September 21, 1893 in Madras, † January 22, 1966 in Mumbai ) was an Indian mathematician.

Rau attended the Presidency College, University of Madras and studied from 1914 at the University of Cambridge in Godfrey Harold Hardy, Ramanujan at the same time, with whom he became friends. A relative of Rough, Ramachandra Rao, was a close friend and patron of Ramanujan. In 1917, he won the Smith Prize, in 1919 he received his doctorate in Hardy and returned to India. He became a professor at the Presidential College, where he remained until his retirement in 1948 and was principal of the college.

As a student of Hardy, he dealt first with Analysis, specifically summability of general Dirichlet series and here Lambert sums. He showed some general Tauber phrases. Later he focused on modular functions and representation of integers as sums of squares. He established in India a school of number theory.

His wife died early in 1928, his daughter, 1940. Later he went blind in one eye.

His doctoral counts K. Chandrasekharan. More of his students were Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, S. Minakshisundaram (1913-1968), MV Subbarao, Ganapathy Iyer, T. Vijayaraghavan (1902-1955), SS Pillai.

He later worked in related fields such as Ramanujan. According to R. Narasimhan he admired Ramanujan, but like other without mystify him or to romanticize.