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.


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