K. R. Parthasarathy

I met Parthasarathy soon after he had written to me recommending Schmidt for the vacant lectureship at Bedford College. Partha assured me that it was very easy to remember how to spell his name... it is a random sequence of vowels and consonents. When I offered him tea, and asked if he wanted it "in the English way, with milk", he pointed out that this was the Indian way, recently (300 years ago) imitated by the English. Partha's story may be a wee bit exaggerated; before tea was planted on a large scale in Assam in the 1820s, it must have been a luxury drink in India, mainly imported from China. The black version may have been served with milk: there was certainly no shortage of cows.

Partha has written two impeccable books, and a brilliant joint work with Klaus Schmidt:

Parthasarathy, K. R., Probability Measures on Metric Spaces, Academic Press, New York, 1967.

Parthasarathy, K. R., and Schmidt, K., Positive definite kernels, continuous tensor products and central limit theorems of probability theory, Springer LNM 272, Berlin, 1972.

Parthasarathy, K. R., An Introduction to Quantum Stochastic Calculus, Birkhauser, Basel, 1992.