The annual tradition of replacing the Kiswa (Black cloth that covers the Kaʿbah) is set to take place on the 1st of Muḥarram, which marks the beginning of the new Islamic Year. 🕋
Peter Scholze (11 December 1987) is a German mathematician and professor at the University of Bonn, also serving as director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics.
He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2018. His key achievement is the introduction of perfectoid spaces, which provided new tools in p-adic geometry and enabled major advances in the Langlands program and arithmetic geometry.
Scholze developed condensed mathematics and continues research on foundational aspects of geometry and number theory. His work has influenced arithmetic geometry and related areas since the 2010s.
Harish-Chandra is one of the most underrated mathematicians in history. Born in Kanpur, India in 1923, he first studied physics and earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1947 under Nobel laureate Paul Dirac.
During his time at Cambridge, he even pointed out a mathematical error in the work of another Nobel laureate, Wolfgang Pauli. Finding theoretical physics insufficiently rigorous, he shifted his focus to pure mathematics.
He went on to build the modern theory of representations of semisimple Lie groups and developed harmonic analysis on these groups and their homogeneous spaces.
His major contributions include the Harish-Chandra character formula (which extends the notion of characters to infinite-dimensional representations), the Harish-Chandra regularity theorem, the Harish-Chandra homomorphism, and key results on discrete series representations and cusp forms.
These works provided the rigorous mathematical foundation for understanding symmetries in quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and particle physics, and later influenced areas like the Langlands program.
He received the Cole Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1954 and India’s Padma Bhushan in 1977. From 1963 until his death in 1983, he worked as a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he produced much of his most important research.
Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri (1923–2005) was one of India's most distinguished theoretical physicists and a pioneer of modern gravitational physics. Born in Barisal (now in Bangladesh), he studied at University of Calcutta and spent much of his career teaching and conducting research in Kolkata. Despite working with limited resources and often outside the major international research centers, Raychaudhuri produced ideas that profoundly influenced modern cosmology and general relativity.
His most celebrated contribution is the Raychaudhuri Equation, derived in 1953. This fundamental equation describes how nearby geodesics in spacetime converge or diverge under the influence of gravity. It provides a mathematical framework for understanding gravitational focusing and the formation of singularities.
The Raychaudhuri equation later became a cornerstone of the singularity theorems developed by Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking. These theorems established that singularities, such as those associated with black holes and the Big Bang, are generic predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity rather than mathematical curiosities.
Beyond its role in cosmology, the Raychaudhuri equation remains central to gravitational theory, black hole physics, relativistic fluid dynamics, and modern studies of spacetime geometry. Raychaudhuri's work demonstrated how a single deep mathematical insight can reshape an entire field. Today he is remembered not only for a remarkable equation but also as a symbol of scientific excellence achieved through perseverance, originality, and intellectual rigor.
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