india

Updated: Nov 15, 2019 13:23 IST

One of the students of the intermediate class at the Patna Science College was brought to the principal for disturbing the mathematics lecture. A friend was visiting the principal at the time; while listening to the complaint, this friend, John Kelly of the University of California, encountered an extraordinary mathematical mind. Special arrangements were made to give the student examinations for higher classes and he cleared all of them easily. In 1965, at 23, he started his PhD program in California. It was on “Cycle Vector Space Theory”.

A relatively new branch of mathematics -- its origin can be traced back only to the late 19th century -- vector space theory has applications in many areas, from quantum mechanics to computer graphics to cryptography.

The student worked for NASA for some time.

But the brilliant student, hailing from an ordinary family in Basantpur village of Bhojpur district in Bihar, decided to come back to India. He mentioned the reason for coming back to one of his teachers as a desire to serve in Indian universities. He taught at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata for a few years. But by then he developed some serious mental health issues. On Thursday, Vashishth N Singh passed away at the age of 77, unacknowledged by the world.

A decade after he developed these issues, Singh was literally on the streets. His schoolmates collected money and sent a team to rescue him. He was brought for medical help to Ranchi, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The doctors suggested that he be taken back to his alma mater and allowed to stay in the familiar hostel environment for better recovery. I remember meeting him for the first time when he was just 33 years old; with wide-open eyes and a silent face, he moved around the school and asked questions to the students and wrote a few lines about his chaotic mental state. He was kept at the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences, Shahadra for a number of years. He was quite friendly with the visitors and expected them to bring him blank notebooks as most of the time he kept himself busy in solving some mathematical problems-- no one knows what these were. He once claimed to have proved Einstein wrong. He used to keep his notebooks locked up and they are still there, perhaps waiting for some genius to decipher them.

It is our failure that we could not manage Singh’s genius. That of John Forbes Nash, another schizophrenic genius was managed better. By providing him with some minimum health security, we thought our duty was over; what he needed was special care.

(The writer is an associate professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University)