We are saddened to announce that Vikram B. Mehta passed away on June 04, 2014. Professor Mehta was a senior member of the Mathematics Faculty at Tata Institute of fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai. He was a member of the Indian National Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the SS Bhatnagar Award. Mehta was known mainly for his work with the study of semi-stable bundles and questions of Schubert varieties, and particularly for the notion of Frobenius splittings in algebraic geometry.
Very sad to hear of Vikram’s passing. I would e-mail him every few months to see how he was doing and my most recent e-mail went unanswered, uncharacteristic. Now I know why. We were graduate students at Berkeley in the ’70s and lived in the same house for many years. When he came to Berkeley in early 2013, my family and I spent a couple of afternoon with him and I, had a chance to spend a bit of time in July ’13 at IIT Madras. A good friend, more like a brother, I am deeply saddened.
I am deeply saddened to learn about Vikram’s passing away. We were colleagues in Elphinstone College. He was a wonderful person and we played cricket for the college team. He was brilliant in Mathematics and Algebra especially was his fascination. He used to recommend books to us to practice Maths. My sincere condolence to his family.The world now has one less genius in Maths.