Dharmic researcher focused on the dating of the
Mahabharata and for those who have some interest in the enigma of the concept of
Yugas. The
Yugas: -
Rta, Treta, Dwapara and Kali, together believed to span total of 43,20,000 years emerged from the attempts to synchronise the lunar and solar calendars, both of which were used by the ancient
Bharatiyas to recognise the flow of time and to seed crops as part of agricultural activities.
Though I know Dr Achar in the domain of
Mahabharata research, he was much more than that.
He received his early education in India. He earned his MS and PhD degrees from the Pennsylvania State University. After his Post-Doctoral work at the Argonne National Laboratory, he taught at the Bucknell University, Pa before joining the Physics Department faculty in 1984.
Northlines
Ajit Balakrishnan
The other day, in an attempt to lift the mood of three-dozen twenty-somethings from an IIM that I was leading through an online mathematical model-building class, I cheerily announced: “Kids, let’s celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Gaussian distribution.”
I assumed they would all jump and join my cheering. Instead, I was greeted with puzzled looks and silence.
Finally, one picked up the courage to ask me: “Sir, you mean the Gaussian distribution that we use every day as part of our cutting-edge machine learning and artificial intelligence work is that old?”
“Yes,” I said. “Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on April 30, 1777, in the city of Brunswick, Germany, came up with the Gaussian distribution in the prime of his life in the 1820s, and died in 1855.”