Mathematician who tracked down India’s maths heritage

Physicist and the country’s preeminent math historian, PP Divakaran, who died recently in Kochi, was a cherished friend of mine for over six decades.

- HS Mani

We first met at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and immediately fell into a discussion about the ground breaking work on parity violation by TD Lee and CN Yang, a topic that had captivated physicists worldwide, and for which they won the Nobel Prize in 1957. What immediately struck me was the remarkable clarity with which Divakaran, or PPD, as his friends called him, explained the intricate details of their research.

His ability to distil complex ideas into understandable points was extraordinary, and would be the hallmark of his eventual work. The second thing about PPD that would soon become evident was the breadth of his interests and his polymathic ability to synthesise them. Sometime in the 1960s, when I was teaching at IIT Kanpur, he came to visit us and expressed a desire to see a temple nearby which was famous for its Gupta-period architecture. As we explored the temple with him, his profound knowledge of its architectural nuances left us all in awe.