Ramchundra (Ramachandra Lal) (

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental syste ...

,रामचन्द्र लाल) (1821–1880) was a British Indian mathematician. His book, ''Treatise on Problems of Maxima and Minima'', was promoted by the prominent mathematician Augustus De Morgan. Writing in his preface to the treatise, De Morgan states that Ramchundra was born in 1821 in

Panipat Panipat () is a historic city in Haryana, India. It is 95 km north of Delhi and 169 km south of Chandigarh on List of National Highways in India, NH-1. The three major battles fought in First Battle of Panipat, 1526, Second Battle of ...

to Sunder Lal, a

Kayasth Kayastha (also referred to as Kayasth) denotes a cluster of disparate Indian communities broadly categorised by the regions of the Indian subcontinent in which they were traditionally locatedthe Chitraguptavanshi Kayasthas of North India, the C ...

of Delhi. He came to De Morgan’s attention when, in 1850, a friend sent him Ramchundra’s work on

maxima and minima In mathematical analysis, the maxima and minima (the respective plurals of maximum and minimum) of a function, known collectively as extrema (the plural of extremum), are the largest and smallest value of the function, either within a given ran ...

. The 29-year-old self-taught mathematician had published the book at his own expense in

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in that year. De Morgan was so impressed that he arranged for the book to be republished in London under his own supervision, and in general undertook to bring Ramchundra's work to the notice of the broader European scientific community. Quoting De Morgan, from the preface of the treatise:

Charles Muses Charles is a masculine given name predominantly found in English and French speaking countries. It is from the French form ''Charles'' of the Proto-Germanic name (in runic alphabet) or ''*karilaz'' (in Latin alphabet), whose meaning was "f ...

, in an article in the ''

Mathematical Intelligencer ''The Mathematical Intelligencer'' is a mathematical journal published by Springer Verlag that aims at a conversational and scholarly tone, rather than the technical and specialist tone more common among academic journals. Volumes are released quar ...

'' (1998) called Ramchundra "De Morgan's Ramanujan". He was mystified why, in spite of De Morgan's efforts to make this "remarkable Hindu algebraist known, he does not appear in most texts on history of mathematics. He is also known for his great ability to calculate." Ramchundra was teacher of science in Delhi College for some time. In 1858, he was native head master in Thomason Civil Engineering College (now

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) at

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. Later that year, he was appointed head master of a school in Delhi.

References

* C. Muses, "De Morgan's Ramanujan". ''Mathematical Intelligencer'', vol. 20, no. 3, 1998, pp. 47–51. * Dhruv Raina, "Ramchundra's Treatise Through the Unsentimentalised Light of Mathematics or the Mathematical Foundation of a Cultural Project", Historia Mathematica, 19, 1992, 371 384. * S.Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina, "The Introduction of Modern Science into India: A Study of Ramchundra, Educationist and Mathematician", Annals of Science, 46, (1989), 597 610; also Habib and Raina, "Vaijnanik Soch ko Samarpit", Sancha, June July 1988, 76 83. * {{Authority control 19th-century Indian mathematicians 1821 births 1880 deaths Scientists from Haryana People from Panipat