Tirukkannapuram Vijayaraghavan

Tirukkannapuram Vijayaraghavan, usually cited as T. Vijayaraghavan, (* November 30, 1902, † April 20, 1955 ) was an Indian mathematician who dealt with Analysis.

Life

T. Vijayaraghavan came from a Brahmin family and was Tamil. His father was a renowned Sanskrit scholar ( " pandit " ), and also Vijayaraghavan was familiar with the Sanskrit and Tamil literature ( he led by André Weil always a Mahabharata in Tamil with it ). He was a disciple of K. Ananda Rau at the University of Madras. In the 1920s he studied under Godfrey Harold Hardy in Oxford, but made ​​no formal degree ( just as in Madras). In 1929 he received his doctorate at Oxford in Hardy ( Properties of power series and continued fractions ). He was at that time already show several publications. As André Weil from 1930 to 1932 at the Aligarh Muslim University, he took the back who had just returned from Oxford Vijayaraghavan as assistants. Weil had a great influence on Vijayaraghavan and made ​​friends with him - Vijayaraghavan led him also in the Sanskrit literature, Weil had already begun in Paris to study. Another mathematician, the Weil promoted, was DD Kosambi ( 1907-1966 ). 1931 left Vijayaraghavan the Aligarh Muslim University and went to the University of Dacca. The reason was that the head of the University secretly wanted to get rid of because that is currently running in Paris André Weil and Vijayaraghavan the items offered, but he refused. To avoid conflicts, he went in 1931 to the University of Dacca.

In 1949 he became Director of the then newly founded by Alagappa Chettiar Ramanujan Institute in Madras. Another well-known mathematician at the Institute was CT Rajagopal (1903-1978), who did his doctorate at Vijayaraghavan. Due to lack of funding but little international contacts could then be set up at the Institute, but it promoted young Indian mathematicians such as CP Ramanujam Raghavan Narasimhan and. Vijayaraghavan died relatively young ( Weil, not least because of his excess weight ).

He dealt first with issues such as Rau of Hardy - school and especially with Borel summability and some showed sentences from the Tauber- type. He refuted a conjecture of Emile Borel on the growth of solutions of nonlinear ordinary differential equations, which gained him international attention and in 1936 an invitation from George David Birkhoff as a guest speaker at the American Mathematical Society. Next he worked on Diophantine approximations, specifically the distribution of the fractional part of for (, fixed real numbers). This led to the introduction of Pisot numbers, sometimes called Pisot - Vijayaraghavan numbers.

In 1934 he became a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences.