Annamalai Ramanathan (29 August 1946 – 12 March 1993) was an Indianmathematician in the field ofalgebraic geometry, who introduced the notion ofFrobenius splitting of algebraic varieties jointly withVikram Bhagvandas Mehta in (Mehta & Ramanathan 1985). The notion ofFrobenius splitting led to the solution of many classical problems, in particular a proof of theDemazure character formula and results on the equations definingSchubert varieties in general flag manifolds.
Ramanathan got his B.Sc in Mathematics atRamakrishna Mission Vivekananda College, and was recruited to attendTIFR, where he got his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1976. His thesis on moduli for principal bundles was published in 1996 in two papers in Proc. Indian Acad. Sci. three years after his death.[1]
Ramanathan, was a Professor of Mathematics at theTIFR in Bombay, India. He has also been employed atUniversity of Bonn,Johns Hopkins University andUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ramanathan made significant contributions to many areas of mathematics, including moduli of vector bundles,Gauge theory, algebraic geometry in positive characteristic andrepresentation theory.
TheCouncil of Scientific and Industrial Research awarded he and his collaboratorVikram Bhagvandas Mehta theShanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology (the Indian Presidential award for achievement in the mathematical sciences) in 1991 for his work in algebraic geometry.
He was also elected aFellow of Indian Academy of Sciences in 1991.
During his tenure as a visiting professor atUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Ramanathan died inChicago, Friday, 12 March 1993, of complicationsfollowing treatment for a heart attack. He is survived by his wife RM. Vasantha and three daughters Lakshmi, Valli, and Priya.[2]
