Rajendra Bhatia did his BSc and MSc from the University of Delhi and his PhD from the Indian Statistical Institute. He was a Reader at the University of Bombay from 1981 to 1984 , after which he joined the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, where he is now a Distinguished Scientist.

Academic and Research Achievements: Much of Bhatia's early work was devoted to perturbation of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices. In this area he obtained many fundamental results and introduced several novel ideas and techniques. The monograph Perturbation Bounds for Matrix Eigenvalues, published by Longman in 1987, was based on this work. This book stimulated a lot of work, became a standard reference, and was republished in 2007 in the series SIAM Classics in Applied Mathematics. After that he made major contributions to matrix inequalities, calculus of matrix functions, means of matrices, and connections between harmonic analysis, geometry and matrix analysis. The books Matrix Analysis (Springer Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 1997) and Positive Definite Matrices (Princeton Series in Applied Mathematics, 2007) are based substantially on his own contributions. Both have been highly acclaimed and have been widely used by research workers in analysis, linear algebra, numerical analysis, computer science, physics and electrical engineering.

Other Contributions: Rajendra Bhatia founded the series Texts and Readings in Mathematics. More recently he founded the series Culture and History of Mathematics in which major works on the history of Indian (and other) mathematics have appeared. Professor Bhatia has spent considerable effort on exposition of mathematics and written articles for pedagogical journals such as the Mathematical Intelligencer, American Mathematical Monthly and Resonance. Bhatia has served for many years on the editorial boards of several major international journals such as Linear Algebra and Its Applications, and SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis.

Awards and Honours: Professor Bhatia was awarded the INSA Medal for Young Scientists in 1982 and the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 1995. In 2016 he was awarded the Hans Schneider Prize for lifetime contributions to Linear Algebra. He is a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore and the Third World Academy of Sciences. He is a JC Bose National Fellow.