OBITUARY

Professor Ashvini Kumar
(July 04, 1943 - January 25, 2014)
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Professor Ashvini Kumar was born on July 04, 1943. Professor Ashvini Kumar has been from the city of Kanpur itself, where his father was a doctor. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1966 from the university of Amsterdam under the mentorship of Professor Arend Heyting, one of the great protagonists of intuitionism. His thesis "Hilbert spaces in intuitionism" was written in Dutch, but on his own he also translated it in Esperanto (believed those days to be the future language of mankind) and along with it also submitted a summarized version in Hindi. Professor Ashvini Kumar had a great command of Dutch, Sanskrit, German, English, Esperanto, and of course Hindi.

He joined I.I.T. Kanpur on April 07, 1970 as an Assistant Professor and in 1991 he became an Associate Professor. He was a mathematician, par excellence, when it came to teaching and understanding. Dr. Sahab Lal Shukla appears to be his only Ph.D. student (1972) from IIT Kanpur who worked in "Sequence spaces in intuitionism". The students were very appreciative of him since besides clearing their doubts he would also ensure that they understood by asking them to repeat what he taught. During his last few years he was interested in the area of human and computer interaction through a construction of a `connectome system' in solving problems in an intuitionistic fashion.

Professor Ashvini Kumar breathed his last in the morning of January 25, 2014. He is survived by his only daughter Sanghmitra and son-in-law Anurag, both of them are Alumni of I.I.T. Kanpur.

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