Roddam narasimha biography template

He made a deep impression on anyone who ever came into contact with him even briefly. In the eighties and nineties Narasimha taught a famous fluid mechanics course for several hours every Sunday in IISc, which had no text book, no stipulated syllabus, no credits and no exams. A crowd would attend, and would benefit from his unique perspective and mastery over fluid mechanics.

He fielded every question with utmost patience. Roddam Narasimha, one of India's most distinguished engineer-scientists, has just passed away at He was a man of awesome scholarship who made pioneering contributions to India's space and aeronautical programmes. He epitomized academic brilliance and integrity, and was a great teacher. A rare breed, he followed in the footsteps of his mentor Satish Dhawan in every way.

I had known him for years and he was one of my favourite human beings. The below article was originally published by Indic Today. The disappearance of Roddam Narasimha. It is hard to accept that Professor Roddam Narasimha has gone away. We have known him, admired him, and venerated him for almost half a century. Year had been rough; there was the lockdown, and then there were illnesses and hospitalisations.

But one Saturday, this November, after confirming that he was at home, we decided to make an impromptu call. Narasimha was pleased to see us; although decidedly frail, the eyes still had the familiar warm glint. And, when it was time to leave, he walked with us to the door to say goodbye. Narasimha was not just a legendary scientist and an intellectual colossus; he was also incredibly caring and affectionate.

All his life Narasimha was the intrepid adventurer in science and technology; and, when required, he could also be the most committed crusader. Champion of parallel computing Consider, for instance, parallel computing. They met Narasimha to ask for more computing power. Flosolver was faster than the existing Univac by at least a factor of three.

Funding for Flosolver could have been tricky, but a minute conversation was enough for Narasimha to convince Dr S. The story does not end here. Narasimha chose to talk about parallel computing. Based on these interactions, Narasimha argued that it was both feasible and desirable to build a light combat aircraft in large numbers. The team returned with a unanimous verdict endorsing the LCA concept.

For the first time, all the principal actors in Indian aeronautics appeared to be on the same page. Later, a high-level committee, headed by Dr S. It then took Defence Minister R. Venkataraman just two minutes to clear the LCA programme. Narasimha was the best man to succeed Valluri, but he failed to show up for the interview. But when the Chairman, Prof.

He would continue at the helm until he retired in July This was the first big leadership opportunity for Narasimha. The soft skills included stronger networking, charismatic leadership, unbridled optimism, and his intense personal charm it was always a great pleasure to interact with Narasimha. The bigger canvas As NAL Director, Narasimha made an impressive start; often a great painter simply needs a bigger canvas to show off his ability and repertoire.

Nothing could be more preposterous. So, right there, I gave an undertaking that we would complete all the wind tunnel testing … and on schedule. The wind tunnels worked for two shifts instead of one, and eventually round the clock. He had that kind of allure and luminescence. He recounted so many Caltech stories. To their great dismay, the bright little speck was indeed seen in the sky at exactly the appointed time.

He had hoped to continue his work on turbulence, but research priorities shifted to outer space, where Navier-Stokes equations did not apply, and Narasimha therefore ended up working on rarefied gas dynamics and the Boltzmann equation. But Narasimha was 24, at the prime of his powers, and everything seemed rather easy. His first paper, on rarefied gas dynamics, did not take too long to appear in print.

A year later, Narasimha found himself at an international meeting in Berkeley, where someone was talking about his paper and declaring that it was all wrong. Hans W. Liepmann, was supportive. We got chatting with other Caltech mathematicians, and I was reassured that my calculations were correct. It ended well; the speaker in Berkeley came down to Caltech, acknowledged his small error and withdrew the paper.

Narasimha was such an engaging raconteur with so many interesting stories to tell. That periodic clearing of the throat, and the engaging smile that frequently broke into a somewhat ironic laugh; we are going to miss all those moments. Almost as soon as he returned, Dr. Vikram Sarabhai invited him to Thumba to witness a rocket launch. At IISc, Narasimha quickly realised that he had to change track; serious computation was then not possible in India.

Multifaceted How could we describe Roddam Narasimha? He was arguably all that, and much more. As a young engineering student, Narasimha remembers reading as many Holmes stories as he could; his friend wanted the book back in 48 hours. In the late s, he got to play Sherlock Holmes while assisting the Satish Dhawan one-man committee. The pilots were refusing to fly the HS Avro aircraft because they said its climb would be dangerously sluggish if one of the two engines failed.

These test flights enabled Narasimha to compile valuable flying data, use it to develop the theory of stochastic corrective processes, and eventually conclude that there was no significant airworthiness issue of concern with the Avro. As he aged, Narasimha became more Mycroft than Sherlock. Rao asked Narasimha to head the investigative team. As for being an essayist, we recall Narasimha lending us a book about good English writing.

Good writing, and good scientific communication, was something that Narasimha deeply cared for. As President of the Indian Academy of Sciences , he recommended the publication of a journal of science education. The first issue of Resonance appeared on January 1, , and, 25 years later, the journal is still marching ahead strongly. I was struck by the articulation of such a different philosophy.

It was also so forcefully expressed… there was such verve, force, humour, lyricism and logic in the verses that reading them actually became a minor obsession with me. At a talk he delivered at NAL on his 73rd birthday in , the optimism had diminished. NAL must learn how to make and ride this approaching wave. Looking back, one is saddened.

Narasimha still had the immense intelligence needed to wage a battle; he knew exactly how the war could be won. He still had abundant will, but was ruefully realising that there might be no way. Insight and Erudition Everyone who met Narasimha came away gushing how learned he was, and how charming. His handshake was warm and firm, and his handwriting was exquisite, and almost a work of art.

Conversations with him were immensely fulfilling. He was an excellent listener; he endeavoured to listen to every word you said, and if he did not catch the word, he would interrupt you and ask you to repeat. He read voraciously, and was a prolific writer. His views were sought by individuals in the highest positions of power. He was often consulted on matters of national security.

In response, the Indian government prepared its Nuclear Doctrine document; it was drafted almost entirely by Narasimha. While the European method was based on hypotheses, generalisations, deductions and abstraction, Narasimha suggested that the Indian way was based on observation, examination and ingenious specific solutions or inferences; often called yukti.

As a child, Narasimha admired clouds for their mystique and variety. An accurate rainfall prediction was therefore essential, and among the many actors that play roles in the enormous monsoon drama, the cloud was the prima donna. The best monsoon prediction model would be the one with the best cloud model within. So, Narasimha lovingly set up a cloud lab to create cloud-like flows.

He was sure that these flows had important and fascinating stories to tell. It did not bother him that he was now 87, and officially old. The karmayogi never wavered from his karma till the very end. This tribute draws heavily from G. Gopal M. Kamath, of our conversations with Narasimha in and Sinha and Dr. This article was originally published by The Frontline.

I did not know professor Narasimha at all till I travelled half the Earth away and suddenly heard of him when he was visiting my graduate school in the US. I made it a point to meet him, and during exchange of pleasantries he told me that he studied at Acharya Patashala APS , that he lived in NR Colony, and went to Vijaya College before doing Engineering.

That information dissipated quickly for me as my thoughts were more focused on the challenges of the day. APS was less than two furlongs from where my family lived for a decade between APS field was where we played cricket, gilli-dhanda, and ran old bicycle tires in and out of Bugle Rock. All top dogs in Basavanagudi when they reached high school age, went to National High School NHS and I thought that was how it was all the time and should have applied to Narasimha as well.

When I read further, the APS grounds became even more hallowed in my view; RN too had played cricket there as well and the cricket ball would often go to the sidelines where the esteemed writer D. Gundappa DVG and others would be debating, and they would throw the ball back. Bangalore just after independence, and Basavanagudi in particular, must have been brimming with star-studded energy and the desire to define a new India.

As we turned into the street, after a few stores, DVG would be sitting sunning in front of his house on a stone bench as if in complete meditation. It was hard for us to understand the past dynamism of DVG almost twenty-five years earlier, but I am now wondering what DVG was thinking in the s in silent contemplation with most of his work done? Narasimha found stimulation through the continuity of ancient Indian Rational Thought, from Aryabhata to Nilakantha, to pursue the type of world-class science that he did with indefatigable energy.

He found a strong argument in the evidence-based Indian reasoning and always felt that we fell behind in the seventeenth century onwards. This article was originally published by Deccan Herald. The 'Cray' supercomputer that the then President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, approved for export to India for use by the India Meteorological Department came loaded with conditions-of-use, which were monitored in-situ by inspection-personnel from the US Embassy in New Delhi.

Flosolver cf. Sinha and Bhogle, above avenged that humiliation. There would have been no Light Combat Aircraft LCA had RN not met with then PM Indira Gandhi -- who expressed her frustration to him -- as he related to me -- that the "aeronautical community cannot seem to come to a consensus on this". RN belonged to that generation of Indian students who pursued higher studies in Europe or the USA and then returned to nourish and build research traditions and capacities in the just turned independent nation, with an insistence on excellence and quality.

Throughout he maintained a close relationship with IISc. Over the years he received several prestigious awards, including being elected Fellow of the Royal Society. RN made fundamental contributions to a number of areas in fluid mechanics, especially in the study of turbulence, the application of parallel computing to problems in fluid dynamics, and finally modelling of the monsoon.

In a landmark paper published on the vibration of an elastic string, RN derived an equation that has since been named after him. At NAL he participated in a number of projects such as the development of the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft LCA , and initiated work on parallel computing for a number of applications. Two months ago I received an email from RN that was the last I would receive, asking me about when a book a colleague and I had edited would be released.

Roddam narasimha biography template

He had an article in this forthcoming volume on German engineering science and its extended genealogy, and its links with Caltech and the India Institute of Science, Bangalore. Like some of the leading scientists of that generation their commitment and work in science in no way exhausted their contributions or personality. He was a scientist well informed about the history of his own discipline, the sciences of the West and India, and made salient contributions to these interdisciplinary fields.

In the coming days and weeks many scientists will turn back and reflect upon and commemorate his contribution to the engineering sciences and the fields of investigation and research programmes that germinated from these contributions. In what follows I shall not discuss his scientific and technological work for the obituaries by his colleagues and students have addressed them with competence, accuracy and a deep fondness.

In the years when I met him frequently there was another side of his immense learning that I encountered and about which I shall present a few reminiscences. This was in the late s and early s when I was working with the history and philosophy of science research programme at NISTADS and had just published my first papers in the philosophy of science and the history of science.

Amongst other things I was curious about documenting the vocation of research programmes that commenced at the so-called periphery of the sciences and acquired global visibility. Late on Saturday afternoons after he had met his PhD students and collaborators I would get some time with him. I was attempting to trace how this research programme evolved over the next decades and the new areas of research that branched out of the same.

While I collected and read papers published by the group I was constantly talking to two former doctoral students, G. Bhat and Sudarsh Kailas. The Saturday meetings gradually became occasions to discuss other matters I was researching at the time with my colleague S. Irfan Habib in Delhi and RN took time to comment on some of the drafts I presented him with interest.

Larger questions on the history and philosophy of science often came up for discussion — and though we agreed upon much, there were many issues about which we thought differently, given the distinct different disciplinary frames we employed to approach the object of discussion — but these differences never came in the way of the interesting and edifying conversations that followed.

Though my reading at the time extended beyond the purely internal accounts of the history of sciences and technology, I learned a great deal from his close and nuanced internal accounts of technology at every meeting during those years. It was around this time that he asked me to look into the life of Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, the grand old man of Mysore and engineer whose life fascinated RN — not just for the engineering but the larger social context within which the former lived and about which he himself knew a great deal.

And here RN was proactive in helping me meet some of the people who were aware of the socio-economic and cultural life of Mysore in the s. So one day we went off to meet the literary icon of old Mysore, Nittur Srinivas Rao, who was then possibly in his late 90s and after having introduced me RN left me to pursue my interviews with him.

He promoted a number of such efforts that were collated in a volume he edited entitled Dialogues across Disciplines. After I returned to my institute in Delhi and our meetings naturally became less frequent, the exchanges continued over email. What continued to intrigue me, as Peter Galison has pointed out in other contexts, was how the empirical, theoretical, matters of instrumentation and personal orientations and resources were so entangled in steering the trajectory of scientific research programmes.

For example, how did the interests in relaminarization and the experimental issues that needed to be sorted out in that domain lead up to the Monsoon Boundary Layer Experiments. And how did these interests dovetail with that of other colleagues leading up to the formation of the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences. RN with his colleagues played a role in the creation of the Centre and much later he was responsible for impressing upon the government the need to create a Ministry of Earth Sciences.

During our conversation on the history of sciences, it became evident that P. The Commission was till then comprised largely by scientists and historians of science. RN made it a point to bring in historians as well. RN took cognizance of the problem that was difficult to resolve given the conceptual momentum and sociological segmentation of disciplinary movements, but in his patient and considered way he carried the different views of the Commission.

His passing away creates a void in the scientific community globally and in India. Roddam Narasimha and his deepest condolences to his family and his students. Biography: Prof. A P J Abdul Kalam. In conversation with Prof. Roddam Narasimha A multifaceted scientist, a mentor, someone who understood the Eastern and Western styles of working, Prof.

This was the beginning of what would go on to be called the space race. Did this impact the kind of research that took place there, and around California during your PhD? In fact, the launch of the Sputnik happened within a week of my registration for my PhD. And in fact, the first problem I did had to do with the related subject of aerodynamic noise.

One problem at that time was that jet engines were making too much noise, and it was a very active area, both as a scientific as well as a technology problem. However, the fact that the Russians had actually launched a satellite, before the United States did, had a profound effect on the Americans. I still remember that when the Russians announced the launch of Sputnik, very few people believed it.

The Russians said that you can hear a beep on a particular frequency, which they said would decisively prove that the satellite was there. So finally the Russians announced when exactly Sputnik would appear over the horizon in different cities. For example, it said it would appear in Los Angeles on the western horizon at some time like pm on a certain day.

I remember the day very well when everyone at Caltech, from the president of Caltech to the janitors, so to speak, were there wondering if they would be able to see that bright little thing moving in the sky. All the terraces were occupied, and people were there everywhere. Then, precisely at the announced time, it promptly came over the horizon.

Its velocity was sufficient to perceive its motion, not very fast since it was far away. So you could actually see Sputnik, and then everything changed overnight in the United States. The Americans were sure now that the Russians had actually done it. The same experience would have been repeated in other places. It was a turning point as it was seen as a national challenge to the United States.

Therefore, they very quickly organized themselves to start a space programme. One of the other things that impressed me was how quickly those changes were made, and in fact they made steep cuts in the budget for aeronautics research programmes. So the huge budget that the aeronautics programme used to receive was cut down drastically, and a lot of it was spent towards getting ready for space.

The research programme in various departments changed, and many aeronautics departments became departments of astronautics and aeronautics, and they started looking at new problems. You could actually see Sputnik, and then everything changed overnight in the United States. Mollo-Christensen, as well as with my advisor Hans Liepmann. We finished that work and submitted it for publication—it was published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

I spent probably a year and a half on it. However, within that short time, I had not really learnt whatever I had come to Caltech to learn. I wanted to do something else which could not be too easily done in India. The problem of jet noise was an interesting problem to work on but it was not sufficiently challenging. And then stay here as a postdoc.

This was one of the effects of the advent of space. The Boltzmann equation is what you have to solve in this case, so everybody suddenly got interested in this equation. There were always some people who had been working on it on the side, and so it was not entirely new, but the emphasis on it increased remarkably fast. My advisor, Hans Liepmann, was actually a physicist by training and, for him, the Boltzmann equation was not new.

He instead saw this as an opportunity to do something which really came directly from his training—and by the way, one of his gurus in Germany, Edgar Meyer, had even been a student of Ludwig Boltzmann. So Liepmann decided to set up a research programme in rarefied gas dynamics, and I said I would like to work on that subject. He was actually making a series of measurements on flow through an orifice, which covered the whole range from where Navier—Stokes and Euler equations are valid, all the way to when they are totally invalid.

At the other extreme limit, it agreed with what Martin Knudsen, a Danish scientist, had predicted. But in between, it was all new and could not be treated by any known theory. So I offered to make an attempt to see if I could do something toward the free-molecule end of the continuum—a nearly free molecule regime. Those were still early days for computing.

There was a computer at Caltech, but it was not in much use. In fact, some of the senior faculty in Caltech did not particularly approve of using computers because they considered that our analytical skills would go down. RN: Yes. Lagerstrom was really very strong in analytical thinking. They were actually not wrong. It has actually happened. While analysis itself may have progressed, many people now, if they can compute, probably will avoid the analysis.

The approximate methods I learnt as a student in aeronautics are in very little use now. But I did a traditional approximate calculation about those nearly free-molecule flows, and it seemed to me that I was making the right assumptions and so on. That was also an interesting exercise and I published it too. When I did a calculation and got a result that agreed with the measurements, it then seemed enough.

So I published a note. I later found that there was an international rarefied gas dynamics meeting that very year, but I had not submitted any paper there. I went there just to see how it was going on. I was not even registered, and I go to this lecture hall and this big senior man there is telling the audience, to my horror, that Narasimha was wrong.

RN: Not in Caltech. It was happening in Berkeley. I went to Berkeley to attend it just for myself. I had by then a car. I was actually devastated. So I drove back immediately [laughs], and told Liepmann that so-and-so says that my calculations are wrong. He has not understood the approximation that I have considered. Now, go and discuss it with the mathematicians in the department.

I talked to both of them and after a fair deal of discussion, both of them certified that what I had done was sensible. So I had two allies now, who were good and reputed mathematicians. The speaker in Berkeley came down to Caltech a few weeks later, and we had a long discussion in detail about it. The fact that I had two allies on my side who knew the mathematics, and coupled with my explanation of the mathematics to him, made him have second thoughts about the issue, and he fortunately withdrew his paper.

The fact was that, after my note had appeared, he had made some little calculation and found that he got a different answer. Anyway, that taught me a lesson and a longer paper was written later on. Was this what got you on the map in terms of being consulted by companies? RN: Yes, perhaps, but there was also the Sputnik effect, which led quickly to the setting up of a large number of private companies.

RN: Exactly. They were the startups of the era, and they were usually run by physicists. RN: Mostly, no. By the way, one of those papers I mentioned had to do with another subject connected with the Boltzmann equation, which was a pure piece of mathematics. It showed that in a free molecule flow, under certain conditions, you would have constitutive relations of the Navier—Stokes type.

That was actually very funny because in what little I had learned, a free molecule flow is totally different from a continuum flow, and we have to take the molecules into account. Krishnamurthy P. Rajeswar C. Krishnaswamy Rao Pattadakal Venkanna R. Rao V. Narayan P. Parameswaran Amrita Pritam K. Raj C. Jasbir Singh Bajaj B. Goyal Purshotam Lal A.

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