IV: Recognition of Ramakrishnan's work by Werner Heisenberg (1956)
Ramakrishnan's publication in the Handbuch der Physik (1959)
Alladi Ramakrishnan's First Round-the-World academic tour of 1956 was
perhaps his most significant. He started by spending two weeks at the
Yukawa Hall where he met Nobel Laureate Hideki Yukawa. Then at Caltech
he met Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman with whom he had a discussion on
the electron travelling back in time. Moving eastward, he met astrophysicist
Subrahmanyam Chandrasekar at the University of Chicago. And then at the
Rochester conference organized by Robert Marshak, he met Robert Oppenheimer,
Director of the Institute for Advanced Study. All these profoundly
influenced his research and professional career.
After visiting the United States, Ramakrishnan returned to India in 1956
via Europe. He stopped in Germany at the invitation of Nobel Laureate '
Werner Heisenberg and gave a talk at the Max Planck Institute for
Physics in Gottingen. In his invitation letter (see attachment), Heisenberg
says that Ramakrishnan's new approach via stochastic processes may
simplify comparison between theory and experiment. Ramakrishnan's
seminar in Germany was attended by Professor Flugge, Editor of the
Handbuch der Physik. Based on the favorable observations of Ramakrishnan's
work by Heisenberg, Flugge invited Ramakrishnan to contribute a survey
article in the Handbuch der Physik, placing the method of product
densities in the context of other major ideas in the theory of
probability. Ramakrishnan's important survey in the Handbuch der Physik
appeared in 1959 and its opening pages are attached.
DOCUMENTS
The url of this page is http://www.krishnaswami-alladi.com/old-website/ar-important-letters/partIV.html.
Created by
K. Alladi
(alladik@ufl.edu) on
Thursday, January 28, 2010.
Last update made Thu Jan 28 23:40:04 EST 2010.
alladik@ufl.edu
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