Madan Lal Mehta

Madan Lal Mehta (born December 24, 1932 in Relmagra , Udaipur , † December 10, 2006 in Udaipur) was an Indian theoretical physicist, known for his work on random matrices .

Mehta studied at the University of Rajasthan (in Jaipur ) with a master's degree in mathematics in 1956, spent two years at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and then at the nuclear research center in Saclay , where he studied theoretical nuclear physics with Claude Bloch at the University of Paris in 1961 PhD (on low density nuclear matter). In 1962/63 he was at the invitation of Eugene Wigner (because of his work on random matrices) at the Institute for Advanced Study , then at the University of Delhi and in 1966/67 at Princeton University and the Argonne National Laboratory . In 1967 he returned to Saclay, where he did research for the CNRS from 1970 (later as Research Director) and became a French citizen in 1971. In 2005 he returned to India.

He published, among others, with Freeman Dyson (with whom he had worked since the time at IAS 1962/63) and Michel Gaudin , with whom he developed the method of orthogonal polynomials in the theory of random matrices in 1960. That was the actual beginning of the mathematical research on random matrices, which Eugene Wigner introduced into theoretical physics in 1951 when he assumed that the resonance spectra of heavy nuclei were distributed like eigenvalues ​​of random matrices. His book on random matrices has long been considered a standard work. Dyson and Mehta divided random matrices into three classes: Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE), Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE), and Gaussian symplectic ensemble (GSE).

In addition to English and French, he spoke Russian, Japanese and Chinese (he was visiting scholar in Mexico, Australia, Japan and China).

Fonts

• Mehta On the statistical properties of the level spacings in nuclear spectra , Nuclear Physics, Volume 18, 1960, pp. 395-419
• Mehta, Gaudin On the density of Eigenvalues ​​of a random matrix , Nuclear Physics, Volume 18, 1960, pp. 420-427
• ML Mehta Random Matrices , Elsevier, 3rd edition 2004
  • First as Random Matrices and the statistical theory of energy levels , Academic press 1967, 2nd edition 1991
• Mehta Elements of matrix theory , Hindustan Publishing Corporation 1977 (a French edition was published in 1988)
• Mehta Random matrices in nuclear physics and number theory in JE Cohen, Harry Kesten, CM Newman (editor), Proceedings of the AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Conference, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, June 1984, Contemporary Mathematics 50 (1986) , 295-309

Web links

• Obituary in Saclay