Harish-Chandra

Harish-Chandra (11 October 1923-16 October 1983) was an Indian mathematician, who did fundamental work in representation theory. He was born in Kanpur, India and died in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. His education at the University of Allahabad was in physics. He came to University of Cambridge as a research student of Paul Dirac, finishing a doctorate in 1947.
He then moved to the USA, where he was at Columbia University from 1950 to 1963. During this period he established as his special area the study of the discrete series representations of semisimple Lie groups - which are the closest analogue of the Peter-Weyl theory in the non-compact case. The methods were formidable and inductive, using Lie group decompositions.
He is also known for work with Armand Borel founding the theory of arithmetic groups; and for papers on finite group analogues.
He was a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey.

Hemachandra Series (Fibonacci Series)

Hemachandra Suri (हेमचन्द्र सूरी) (correct Sanskrit spelling Hemacandra Sürí) (1089 -1172) was one of the greatest scholars of his time. He wrote on many subjects: grammar, philosophy, tradition, and contemporary history.
One of his best known works is the "Tri-shashthi-shalaka- purusha-charitra", the lives of the 63 illustrious persons in Jainism. After having written this, he composed an appendix to it (hence called "Parishista-parvan"). This appendix, also called "Sthaviravali-charitra" is actually itself a text of considerable value.
Hemacandra, following the earlier Gopala, presented what is now called the Fibonacci series around 1150, that is at least 50 years before Fibonacci.

Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan

"Almost a century after his death, it was said of him, "Ramanujan was a mathematician so great that his name transcends jealousies, the one superlatively great mathematician whom India has produced in the last thousand years. His leaps of intuition confound mathematicians even today, seven decades after his death. His papers are still plumbed for their secrets. His theorems are being applied in areas scarcely imaginable during his lifetime." (quoted from Kanigel's biography, "The Man who knew Infinity", p.3)

Ramanujan, Srinivasa, 1889–1920, Indian mathematician. He was a self-taught genius in pure mathematics who made original contributions to function theory, power series, and number theory with the training gained from a single textbook. He was invited to Cambridge by G. H. Hardy, with whom he collaborated, and continued there his work in number theory. He died of tuberculosis.

The Alchemist

"When you really want something to happen, all the Universe conspires in helping you."
"It's not often that money saves a person's life."
"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure"


The Alchemist is the most famous work of author Paulo Coelho, a symbolic story that urges its readers to follow their dreams.

The novel tells the tale of Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd who has a repeating dream that leads him to North Africa on a quest of discovery. This story speaks of the "Soul of the World" and that the Earth itself wants us to be happy. This story tells how each of us have a single mission or goal in life, a Personal Legend, though most of us don't realize it. But most importantly it speaks of how doing good deeds for others is eventually rewarded and though we don't know what our treasure will be, or where and how we will receive it, if we follow our heart, we will find it.