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.
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