IX. Recognition of Alladi Ramakrishnan's research
by Nobel laureate Dirac, 1971
Nobel Laureate P. A. M. Dirac was Alladi Ramakrishnan's first guest
at the Theoretical Physics Seminar in Ekamra Nivas in 1954. Dirac was
a great influence on Ramakrishnan who studied Dirac's ideas closely.
In particular Ramakrishnan was haunted by the question as to why
Dirac used only four of the 4× 4 anti-commuting matrices
when there was a fifth, called the γ5 that he (Dirac) ignored.
In particular, Ramakrishnan studied the transition from the 2× 2
anti-commuting matrices of Pauli to the 4× 4 Dirac matrices.
In doing so, Ramakrishnan
came up in 1967 with a new idea he called the $\sigma -operation$, which
not only enabled him to construct the Dirac matrices from the Pauli matrices,
but also led to the more general ω - commutation$ relation and
matrices of higher dimension. Ramakrishnan by himself and with his
students studied these more general relations in the context of
generalized Clifford algebras and published several papers.
Alladi Ramakrishnan prsesented this work at many places worldwide, and
in particular at the Rutherford Centenary Conference in Christchurch,
New Zealand, in 1970. We attach here a letter from Professor Dirac of 1971
in which he acknowledges receipt of Ramakrishnan's preprint of the
his talk at the Rutherford Conference and acknowledges that the generalized
commutation relations obtained by Ramakrishnan are quite interesting.
DOCUMENTS
The url of this page is http://www.krishnaswami-alladi.com/old-website/ar-important-letters/partIX.html.
Created by
K. Alladi
(alladik@ufl.edu) on
Thursday, January 28, 2010.
Last update made Thu Jan 28 23:43:29 EST 2010.
alladik@ufl.edu
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