Sanjeev Dhurandhar
I was greatly shocked by the untimely demise of Paddy as were others. He was so young. I have known Paddy for about four decades. He joined the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) after I had left TIFR for Raman Research Institute, Bangalore after submitting my thesis. I first heard of him in Bangalore, as a very bright student who had joined TIFR. I actually met him in person probably a year or two later. At that time I was impressed by his grasp of general relativity and general physics.
I was highly impressed by the breadth and the depth of his knowledge in physics and especially in astrophysics. His interests and knowledge were very broad and ranged from hard core astrophysics to general relativity, to the intricacies of quantum field theory and modern mathematics. The books that he wrote are the evidence to this. He wrote several books which are witness to the stupendous energy he had - and this was just part of his several activities which included research, supervising research students, general administration etc. and all these he carried out with the highest efficiency. Just writing a 10 or 15 page paper involves a lot of work in weeding out errors, editing etc. (and can take a week or two for me). Writing one book even, involves tens of times that effort (even conservatively assuming a linear scaling) - and he wrote several. It seems superhuman to me.
He was my colleague at IUCAA for nearly three decades and his uncompromising standards have left a mark on IUCAA. This was borne out when he joined IUCAA in the early nineties and excellent graduate students were selected as research students, which directly proved highly beneficial to me. I am grateful to him for this. Although we did not work together on any formal research problems, often we discussed problems applicable to physics, involving indepth and thought provoking mathematics and sometimes those not just in physics, but even in finance!
IUCAA, India and the world has lost a great scientist and it is loss to everyone of us.
S. Ananthkrishnan
All of us in our family are deeply shocked by the sudden demise of dear Paddy. Each and everyone of our family knew him and Vasanthi. We used to often visit his parents who hail from the village Karamana in Trivandrum. My Grandfather used to teach in the school near that villlage and I too grew up in Trivandrum till age 10 and studied in school in Trivandrum. My dad was the phone engineer in charge of Trivandrum. That is how we knew Paddy and his parents. He sent me an article in a well circulated Kerala weekly on his Life time achievement award two days ago saying he is sending it because I can read in Malayalam. After reading it, I wrote him a long mail immediately, with little knowledge of his impending last days.
Aroonkumar Beesham
I was shocked and devastated to hear about the passing away of Prof Padmanabhan, one of the finest relativists that India has produced.
I first met him in 1988 at a conference in Perth, Australia and was immediately impressed by this vibrant young scientist. It was clear that he was really headed for great heights. I expressed interest in visiting India, and he referred me to Jayant, whom I contacted, and I spent 6 months as a postdoc at IUCAA during 1992. At that time, the main buildings at IUCAA were still being constructed, and we stayed one of the old staff houses. Paddy joined IUCAA a little later, and was our neighbour. My youngest daughter and Hamsa played a lot together as they were about the same age. I had interaction with Paddy, and enjoyed his Ph D lectures and seminars. He had great insight, and would immediately get to the heart of a problem. He did visit South Africa a few times, as a guest of George Ellis, my Ph D supervisor, who also had very high regard for Paddy. I also remember vividly the outstanding lectures he gave at a workshop on structure formation in Iran in 1999, which I also happened to attend.
Peter Coles
Paddy was not only a prolific researcher, with over 300 articles and many books to his name, but also a very gifted public speaker. Although we met and chatted a few times I never really got to know Paddy personally, but I shall remember him best for the many wonderful lectures I heard him give, at conferences and in seminars, the first being at Sussex when I was a graduate student there ay back in the 1980s.
The sudden death of such a highly esteemed colleague and friend has shocked his family and circle of friends, as well as the physics community in India, and is sure to have a similar effect around the world as news travels. Paddy travelled widely and had collaborators across the globe, including in the United Kingdom and United States.
All I can do here is to offer my sincere condolences to his family, friends, scientific colleagues who are grieving now, and for whom his loss will be irreparable.
Sriram Ramaswamy
I am an unabashed fan of Paddy's, and the news of his death was a terrible shock. I knew of his existence long before I met him, through a 1980 preprint of his with Jayant Narlikar in which they approach the path-integral for quantum gravity by integrating over all spacetimes in a given conformal class. I have no idea what Paddy thought of the calculation more recently, nor what JVN thinks of it today, but it's still clear in my memory. In more recent years I've shared his excitement as he presented gravity as an effective large-scale description, like fluid mechanics, or summarized his "theoretical minimum" course in all of physics, or highlighted "Sleeping Beauties in Theoretical Physics". Paddy as a scientist was simply amazing. He did research at the highest, deepest and most competitive level, taught brilliant and demanding courses on fundamental physics, wrote textbooks, problem books, monographs, pedagogical articles, popular articles, and everything in between, and delivered lectures at every level, each tailored to the occasion at hand. He is a counterexample to any claim that any of these activities impedes the others. What an irreplaceable loss.
R Ramachandran
I am an admirer of Paddy – his erudition, his clarity of expression, his pedagogic zeal, his scholarship, his wit and indeed everything about him. He contributed several pieces for the ‘Curiosities in Theoretical Physics’ when I was the Chief Editor of the pedagogic journal (now online at www.physedu,in) and I was surely curious expecting them each quarter. I am happy they have all been part of his delightful monograph “Sleeping Beauties in Theoretical Physics – 26 surprising Insights”. I stumbled upon his philosophical blogs and his equally compelling logic in them as well. I have shared his piece titled ‘My Favourites from Gita’ with several of my non physics friends and relatives, telling them how scientific Gita appears in this Paddy’s exposition.
I am afraid it was too soon for him to depart. As many have remarked he will live through his body of work for ever. Vijaya, Siddharth and Ranjani join me in conveying our heartfelt condolences to Vasnathi, Hamsa and the extended family in IUCAA and elsewhere.
