Life of eminent mathematician Dr Mangala Narlikar who passes away at age of 80

Eminent mathematician and scientist Dr Mangala Narlikar, wife of noted astrophysicist Dr Jayant Narlikar, passed away at her residence in Maharashtra’s Pune city on Monday after a prolonged illness, family sources said. She was 80.

 

 

Dr Mangala Narlikar was battling cancer for more than a year, a family member said. She is survived by her husband, three daughters and five grandchildren.

 

 

 

Dr Narlikar spent many decades in both research as well as teaching Mathematics and also contributed to the revision of the Math syllabus for school students. She was also a proponent of rationalism and a scientific attitude and a popular writer.

 

She is one of the few women mathematics researchers in the country, she completed her PhD, 16 years after marriage.

 

She has worked in the field of both Simple Arithmetic and Advanced Mathematics at the University of Pune and the University of Mumbai. Her core fields of interest were real and complex analysis, analytic geometry, number theory, algebra and topology.

 

She initially worked at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai before joining as a lecturer at Bombay and Pune universities.

 

After becoming the chairperson of Balbharti, she made several significant changes in the state vernacular curriculum, particularly the simplification of the names of numbers.

 

She has written several books for school students on mathematics in English, Hindi and Marathi. Not only did she go on to write books but also made concrete changes to the way textbooks are published. The books that she wrote were sold for just 10 so that every child could afford them.

 

She has been honoured with the Vishwanath Parvati Gokhale Award 2002 for one of her books in Marathi.

 

As a teacher, she is popularly known for the way she makes mathematics an interesting subject for her students. She has contributed immensely to generating interest among laypeople in the subject through various articles in publications like the Scientific Age, where she would break down concepts in a language everyone could understand.