Rajagopalan Parthasarathy earned his BSc degree (1965) from University of Madras, MSc (1967) from the IIT, Madras, PhD (1974) from University of Bombay and D.H.C (Docteur Honoris Causa, 2009) from France specializing in Representation Theory of Semisimple Lie Groups. He was CNRS Directeur de Recherche in Laboratoire Mathematiques, Universite des Sciences et Technologie de Lille, France for a brief duration.

Academic and Research Achievements: Parthasarathy is a leading international expert in the area of Representation Theory of SemiSimple Lie Groups. He has written several important papers in the subject which have been widely referred to. His first piece of work on the realization of the so called discrete series of representations of a semi simple Lie groups in the space of Dirac Spinors attracted immediate attention from experts all over the world. The promise held out by this very beautiful initial piece of work has been fully sustained in a series of subsequent papers. Parthasarathy made considerable progress in many central problems in representation theory. His papers on the resolution of the Blattner Conjecture and the question of unitarisability of certain highest weight modules are well-known to experts in the area and are very significant contributions to this very difficult, competitive and central area in Mathematics. His other notable contributions include associating Cantor Dynamical Systems to a non-properly ordered Brattelli diagram by launching a modified approach different from the celebrated Vershik-Skau-Putnam-Skau approach in the properly ordered case. He used it to study the (ordered) K-theoretic dimension group of aperiodic Cantor dynamical systems.

Awards and Honours: Parthasarathy received the title Docteur Honoris causa of Universite' de Valenciennes, France in 2009. He is a Fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore and National Academy of Sciences (India), Allahabad.