Vashishtha Narayan Singh was a renowned Indian academic, born on April 2, 1946, and passed away on November 14, 2019. He was recognized as a child prodigy and earned his Ph.D. in 1969. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he taught mathematics at various institutions. In the early 1970s, Singh was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He disappeared during a train journey and was discovered years later. He was readmitted to the hospital and eventually returned to academia in 2014. In 2020, he was posthumously awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian honor.
Early life and career
Singh was born to Lal Bahadur Singh, a police constable, and Lahaso Devi in the Basantpur village of the Bhojpur district in Bihar, India.
Singh was a child prodigy. He received his primary and secondary education from Netarhat Residential School, and he received his college education from Patna Science College. He received recognition as a student when he was allowed by Patna University to appear for examination in the first year of its three-year BSc (Hons.) Mathematics course and later MSc examination the next year.
Singh joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 and received a Ph.D. in Reproducing Kernels and Operators with a Cyclic Vector (Cycle Vector Space Theory) in 1969 under doctoral advisor John L. Kelley.
After receiving his PhD, Singh joined the University of Washington at Seattle as an assistant professor and then returned to India in 1974 to teach at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. After eight months, he joined Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Bombay where he worked in a short-term position. Later he was appointed a faculty at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.
The tragic end of his career
Vashishtha Narayan was found picking garbage near his wife’s village, four years after he was lost in a train while traveling to Pune to live with his brother.
His contribution to Apollo 11!
In 1969, after completing his studies at the University of California, Vashishtha Narayan Singh began working as a mathematician at NASA. This was during the time when Apollo 11 was being prepared for launch. An interesting story is told about this time. It is said that during the launch of Apollo, all the equipment suddenly stopped functioning. However, Vashishtha Narayan Singh began making calculations. The computer was down for about 30 to 35 seconds, during which he performed mathematical calculations. When the computer was finally fixed, it was found that his calculations matched exactly with those of the computer.