Numbers and Shapes: Bose's Theories and Life

While many of us faint on seeing huge numbers and shapes, R C Bose enjoyed playing with them and making theories to explain their existence. He was born today to make our mathematics more complex but our lives easier!

Simple smile of the complex mathematician; Source: Mountain Scholar

"Raj, how could you not score marks in geography? What is simpler than this subject?" Protap Chandra Bose's anger must have been on the seventh sky when he saw the report card of his son. He was a physician and served as a doctor in the British army. So much was at stake, so many hopes and dreams but this stubborn little kid did not understand how prodigious he was.

Ever since Raj was born on 19 June 1901, his father had had many ambitions for him. He pushed his eldest son so hard sometimes that he forgot he was but just a child. Anything apart from the first rank was considered a failure by Raj's father and so when he came second in geography, Protap could not bear it.

He made his son learn the whole book of geography by heart, something which was not very difficult for the boy as he had an eidetic memory! A lesson that helped Raj Chandra Bose become a great mathematician of his time!

Life was good for the child prodigy for the first seventeen years. But then his mother died of influenza. Following year, he lost his father to a stroke. Raj Chandra Bose was left alone but he had the lessons of his parents. He continued studying the subjects he had an interest in by winning scholarships.

Bose began his research in geometry in Kolkata under Shyamdas Mukherjee's guidance. Financial conditions made it difficult for him to continue his research but he kept on the work and published his first book On the number of circles of curvature perfectly enclosing or perfectly enclosed by a closed convex oval in 1932.

His work brought the attention of many prominent people. PC Mahalanobis approached him and this opened many doors of opportunities for Bose. He was offered a part-time job in the Indian Statistical Institute, an offer that solved half of his problems.

Then began a line of successes for Raj Chandra. He went to States as a visiting professor. Bose was the professor in demand. Be it the Virginia Polytechnic Institute or the University of North Carolina, he taught all students the wonders of mathematics, opening gates of numbers and shapes for them as well.

While teaching, he made significant discoveries in coding theory with his colleagues and constructed the Graeco-Latin square of size 10. Bose retired when he was seventy years old but still continued guiding students in their doctoral.

Today, he is remembered in the world of mathematics through a Cryptology and Security Centre named after him in Indian Statistical Institute. His contributions in Association scheme, in Bose-Mesner algebra, in Euler's Conjecture and in Cryptology, continue to make the lives of future mathematicians simpler. They have made it easier for us to understand the world around us!