Vijay Raghunath Pandharipande (August 7, 1940 – January 3, 2006) was an

Indian-American Indian Americans or Indo-Americans are citizens of the United States with ancestry from India. The United States Census Bureau uses the term Asian Indian to avoid confusion with Native Americans, who have also historically been referred to ...

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...

, who played a leading role in the development of the nuclear many-body problem.

Biography

Pandharipande obtained his

bachelor's A bachelor's degree (from Middle Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate academic degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six ye ...

and

master's degree A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice.

from

Nagpur University Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University (RTMNU), formerly Nagpur University, is a Public university, public State university (India), state university located in Nagpur, Maharashtra. It is one of India's oldest universities, as well as th ...

in 1959 and 1961 respectively. He earned his PhD degree from

University of Bombay The University of Mumbai is a collegiate, state-owned, public research university in Mumbai. The University of Mumbai is one of the largest universities in the world. , the university had 711 affiliated colleges. Ratan Tata is the appointed ...

in 1969. After working at

Niels Bohr Institute The Niels Bohr Institute (Danish: ''Niels Bohr Institutet'') is a research institute of the University of Copenhagen. The research of the institute spans astronomy, geophysics, nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum mechanics and biophysics. ...

and

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

, Pandharipande joined the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

in 1972, becoming a faculty member there in the next year. He became a full professor in 1977 and stayed there the rest of his life. In recognition of his fundamental contributions to determining the structure of light nuclei by solving the Schrödinger problem with more than three nucleons using realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions supplemented by three-body forces, Pandharipande was awarded the prestigious

Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics The Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics is an annual prize awarded by the American Physical Society's Division of Nuclear Physics. Established in 1964, and currently consisting of $10,000 and a certificate, the Bonner Prize was founded in memor ...

of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...

in 1999. His son,

Rahul Pandharipande Rahul Pandharipande (born 1969) is a mathematician who is currently a professor of mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH) working in algebraic geometry. His particular interests concern moduli spaces, enumerativ ...

is a leading mathematician working on algebraic geometry.

References

1940 births 2006 deaths Indian emigrants to the United States Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj Nagpur University alumni University of Mumbai alumni Cornell University faculty University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty American Hindus 20th-century American physicists American people of Marathi descent {{Physicist-stub