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.


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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.
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