Pune: 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. After moving to India from Cambridge, England with her husband, she started working at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and also taught maths at the University of Bombay.
In 1989, the couple moved to Pune where she worked in the mathematics department of the University of Pune (now Savitribai Phule Pune University). Her mortal remains would be kept at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) here for people to pay homage. The cremation will later be held at the Vaikunth crematorium.
Born in Mumbai on May 17, 1943, Narlikar topped the MA (Maths) stream of the University of Mumbai in 1964. Later, she went to the University of Cambridge and taught at the undergraduate school till 1969 and again returned to TIFR as a teacher till 1980, and in between she earned her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Mumbai.
Dr Narlikar's core fields of interest were real and complex analysis, analytic geometry, numbers theory, algebra and topology, and she carried out research in pure mathematics. Over the years, she taught at the University of Mumbai, University of Pune, and also the MSc students at the Bhaskaracharya Pratishthana, delivered lectures in other institutions in India and abroad, authored several scholarly research papers on mathematics and wrote two books on the subject, and strongly espoused the cause of women in science. ( with agency Inputs)
