A Titan, Remembered

With his ready wit, theoretical physicist E.C.G. Sudarshan was a great orator, and a listener, too

- Prof Ranjit Nair

The University of Texas at Austin, in its obituary notice, “mourns passing of George Sudarshan, titan of 20th century physics”. They did well by him after the event, but perhaps not enough. Why would a titan not have been honoured with a chair, as his American colleague Steven Weinberg had been? In fact, George had persuaded American theoretical physicist John Wheeler and Belgian chemist and physicist Ilya Prigogine to move to Austin. Weinberg followed. George was interested in some of the most fundamental problems that theoretical physics was confronted with and took a giant stride when he formulated the V-A theory of the weak nuclear forces, having analysed the problem theoretically for his PhD thesis, supervised by Robert Marshak.