IUCAA - Khagol # 129 - Oct 2022 - English

| KHAG L | No. 129 - OCTOBER 2022 | 02 his own condition! He would join only if he were permitted toworkwithme. Normally, a graduate school student would work to clear all the required lectures and tests in the first year and the Faculty would then assign him/her to what it considered the most suitable guide. Thus a student asking for a specific guide right at the beginning was most unusual. But the Director felt that the student's performance at the interview was so good that he had agreed to it. That was how Paddy came to be my student. * * * His interests were more in formal aspects of fundamental physics, than in astronomy although he was well read in both. I set him towork on quantumcosmology. I had been working on this since my visit to John Wheeler in 1977. As I discovered, Paddy was quick to pick up the basic idea. In fact his thesis was completed in less than four years. Later in his post doctoral work he was never short of ideas and had a growing number of students of his own.In fact slowly but surely his reputation as an excellent teacher began to grow. Thus he was in great demand as a speaker both for technical and nontechnical meetings. His books mainly from Cambridge University Press are excellent examples of pedagogical writings. * * * His major mission in research was to link gravity with thermodynamics. This may look like (but ismuch deeper than) Stephan Hawking's linkage between the laws of black hole physics and the laws of thermodynamics. Paddy himself talked of gravity as an emergent phenomenon. This work was part of his presentation for the Infosys Award. Paddy was honored on several occasions with awards like the S.S. Bhatnagar Award, Fellowships of academies, including the international Al-Khwarizmi award from Iran. His brief biodata gives a glimpse of these. For me though, his joining IUCAA was a great help. As expected, he brought impeccable standards in teaching and research. An example of plain living and high thinking, he expected others to be equally disciplined. His 'hard judge' image sometimes made him unpopular! But this helped inmaintaining good standards. Paddy is survived by his wife Vasanti who had been his research colleague and a valuable assistant in his writings. Their daughter Hamsavahini (Hamsa) is herself an excellent research scientist. ThanuPadmanabhan Date of Birth: 10March, 1957 M.Sc. in University College, University of Kerala in 1979 Ph.D. Mumbai University at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, 1983 Broad area of research : Fundamental physics – gravity, quantumtheory Publications: Several advance level text books, review articles and popular science articles Positions: Senior Faculty positions at TIFR and later at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) 2006-2009 President of Cosmology Commission of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Fellowship of Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) Member and sometime President of the Indian Association of General Relativity and Gravitation, Astronomical Society of India S.S. Bhatnagar Award in Physics, TWAS Award in Physics, INFOSYS Award, Khwarizmi International Award (KIA) Padmashri Award 2007 Paddy's biodata is very extensive… here Imention only a fewhighlights. ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬ ¬