Draft:P.P. Divakaran

पी.पी. दिवाकरन (Hindi), പി.പി. ദിവാകരൻ (Malayam)

Divakaran was a historian of mathematics as well as a physicist. He published work on the history of mathematics in India.

Early Life

Puthan was born about 1936. He passed away about 2025. PP was born in the village of Makkoottam near Thalassery, Kerala India. His father was Damodaran and his mother Devaki. He had a brother, PP Sudhakaran that called him Ettan, which is Malayam for elder brother, that was a history professor at Kozhikode. Their older sister was a well-known English teacher in Karnataka.

Education and Career

Divakaran earned his doctorate degree at the University of Chicago in quantum physics. He spent many years at Tata's Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). His early education was at St. Joseph's in Thalassery. After that, he did pre-university work at Brennan College. He sought his first physics degree at Presidency College, Chennai. He spent some time working at the Atomic Energy Commission before he joined TIFR. He went to England to study at Oxford University.

Mathematics History

It was only after retiring in 1996 that Divakaran became aware of the fascinating history of Kerala's mathematicians. After many years of research at Pune's Inter-university Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Divakaran published his work on Indian Mathematics, The Mathematics of India: Concepts, Methods, Connections, a text that helped spread awareness of ancient Indian Mathematicians.

His major focus was on Kerala School of Mathematics, which included Madhava of Sangamagrama, an ancient Indian mathematician and astronomer and his contribution to the domain of calculus even before German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and English polymath Isaac Newton.The Kerala School focused primarily on trigonometric functions.

M.S. Narasimhan says in a review of Divakaran's book that the author "writes about the school's members, their work, and their social background. The entire third part of the book is devoted to a detailed account of the Nila (Nila Valley)School's work, using modern mathematical language as needed".

Personal Life

PP met his wife Odiele Mousnier-Buisson while he was at Oxford. She was studying the Medieval Temple Architecture of South India. Divakaran and Odiele had two sons, Ashok and Satyan. He and his wife Odiele later separated.

Later Years

In 2022-23, he received the Kairali Global Lifetime Achievement Award, which had been created by the Kerala government to honour lifelong contributions to research.

Near the end of his life, in 2024, Divakaran returned to physics and examined the relationships between fundamental constants like the gravitational constant and Planck's constant, etc.

Divakaran passed away while living in a home for the aged near Perumbavoor. His son Ashok was beside him when he passed. He was 89 years old.

Selected Physics Publications

• Divakaran, P.P., Vengurlekar, A.S. "Unitarity Bounds in Multiparticle Production: Spins and Polarizations". Nucl.Phys.B 102 461-477 (1976).
• Divakaran, P.P. "A Unified Theory of Weak Interactions". Pramana 13 237 (1979).
• Divakaran, P.P., Ramachandran, R. "Implications of Lepton Flavor Mixing for Neutral Current Phenomenology". Phys.Rev.D 25 2278 (1982).
• Divakaran, P.P., Rajasekaran, G. "A New mechanism for neutrino mass", Mod.Phys.Lett.A 14 913-918 e-Print: hep-ph/9901305 [hep-ph] (1999).
• Divakaran, P.P., "Matter in Discrete Space-Times". e-Print: 2404.04548 [gr-qc] (2024).

References