Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar

Who was Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar?

Shreeram Shankar Abhyankar (22 July 1930 – 2 November 2012) was an Indian American mathematician known for his contributions to algebraic geometry. At the time of his death, he held the Marshall Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Chairman at Purdue University, and was also a professor of computer science and industrial engineering. Abhyankar was born during the late British Raj, in a Marathi Chitpavan Brahmin family in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, India. from the Royal Institute of Science of University of Mumbai in 1951, his M.A. at Harvard University in 1952, and his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1955. Before going to Purdue, he was an associate professor of mathematics at Cornell University and Johns Hopkins University. His later research was in the area of computational and algorithmic algebraic geometry. His thesis, written under the direction of Oscar Zariski, was titled Local uniformization on algebraic surfaces over modular ground fields.

Abhyankar was appointed the Marshall Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Purdue in 1967.

Historical significance

He is known for Abhyankar's conjecture of finite group theory.