I. Ramakrishnan goes to Manchester for his PhD (1949-51)
Recognition of Ramakrishnan's work in England
Alladi Ramakrishnan started research work under Homi Bhabha in 1947
during the early years of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.
Bhabha introduced Ramakrishnan to the problem of cosmic radiation and
its probabilistic/stochastic underpinnings. Soon Ramakrishnan solved
the problem that Bhabha gave him by an elegant method. Bhabha had his
own approach to the problem which he preferred, although it was longer.
So Ramakrishnan decided to leave the Tata Institute in 1949 and go to
England for his PhD.
Very quickly, Ramakrishnan was admitted to the University of Manchester
to do his PhD under the direction of Professor M. S. Bartlett, a leading
statistician (see letter of admission attached). Bartlett immediately
recognized the correctness of Ramakrishnan's approach and its elegance.
In his letter of January 1960 (see attachment below), Bartlett referred
to Ramakrishnan's solution as ``very pretty''. Bartlett immediately
communicated Ramakrishnan's papers to the Cambridge Philosophical
Society the first of which appeared in February 1950 (see attachment).
The rapidity with which this paper was published is important because
Bhabha's work on the same topic appeared in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society in August 1950.
Ramakrishnan 's work on product densities which formed the content
of his PhD thesis at Manchester, and which was published in the
Cambridge Philosophical Society, extended earlier work of the famous
statistician D. G. Kendall higher degrees. Kendall appreciated
the originality of Ramakrishnan's approach as can be seen from
Kendall's letter (see attached) to Sir Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer
on Ramakrishnan's progress. The list of students awarded the PhD
degree at the University of Manchester in 1951 is also attached.
DOCUMENTS
The url of this page is http://www.krishnaswami-alladi.com/old-website/ar-important-letters/partI.html.
Created by
K. Alladi
(alladik@ufl.edu) on
Thursday, January 28, 2010.
Last update made Thu Jan 28 23:37:39 EST 2010.
alladik@ufl.edu
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