rbanerji@sju.edu

Ranan Banerji retired from teaching Mathematics and Computer Science at Saint Joseph's in 1993. He joined St. Joe's in 1982. He now lives in New Jersey with his wife, Purnima (Lekha - click here for details) - about a mile from their older daughter, son-in-law and three of his grandchildren. Their other daughter, her husband and two children live in Ohio. The children in the small day-care center run by their daughter have also become surrogate grandchildren to him and to Lekha, as have the children of their friends. They also help out the local school district by tutoring in mathematics.

That introduces the story from the end (quite literary in style, wouldn't you say?). The picture on the right shows him around this time. But the story should start at the picture on the left - the beginning of his academic career - at least as far as the US is concerned. At this time he had about three papers and two letters to the editor under his belt. Circa 1953.

Ranan was born in Calcutta and grew up in the coalfields of Bihar, about 200 miles west of his birthplace. His father taught Physics and Mathematics in a technical college devoted mainly to mining. He grew up pottering around his dad's laboratory. His early ambition of being a marine engineer (skipping over the earlier ones of being a train conductor, soldier etc.) got transformed by a sudden love affair with Physics early in college. He probably would have been jobless during the post-war dip in employment for Physicists were it not for his father's foresighted insistence that he studied Radio Physics as a part of his Masters curriculum. So his Ph.D. work got steered into the study of the Ionosphere. His scientific career started right after his Masters - the Ionosphere Research Laboratory at Calcutta was the only place in the far east where regular Ionospheric data was gathered (this was of great use for wartime communication, and the laboratory was well endowed by the Government). His thesis was on the Random Fluctuation of Radio waves. He made occasional sorties into the molecular physics of the upper atmosphere (the structure of the Ionosphere is largely guided by the interaction of solar radiation with air molecules), but soon realized that he did not know enough about atomic physics to do a good job there. By then he had come to the United States to serve as a Research Associate (technically an Assistant Professor of Engineering Research) at Penn State. At this point there were two other love affairs. Career-wise, he saw his first digital computer and got excited by it. Personally, he fell in love with Purnima, a student of educational statistics and married her. Both of these made some changes in his career path, as we will soon see.

On his return to India he started working as a Lecturer in the University of Calcutta. Probably that is where he would have been to-day, but a married man with a baby, used to American ways could hardly support his family with the salary meted out by the University. His new-found love of computers came in handy (together with certain academic politics - what else?): he received an offer from the computing center at the Indian Statistical Institute (an agency of the young Government of India, helping its five-year plans). That place had the only digital computer India had at the time - a Hollerith machine with 16 bit words, a 1000 word memory on a drum and a 16-order code which was programmed in machine language (NOT assembly language, mind!) on IBM punched cards in binary.

The JACM had just started publication, and there was wind of Automatic programming (FORTRAN) and Artificial Intelligence in the air: it was all too exciting. Ranan wangled his way back into the US (the details of the wangle are interesting and somewhat dramatic, but perhaps the reader should be spared that). His career started at the Case Institute of Technology (Now the Case Western Reserve University). The most fruitful research time of his life was the twelve years he worked there. An academic stupidity made him quit his Professorship at Case for a teaching position at Temple University. It slowed him down in research (he hung on by sheer tenacity and a few pieces of unusual good luck), but did him a lot of personal good. His wife's career flourished. She obtained her D.Ed., got several grants for developing a computer laboratory for the mentally gifted in her school and enjoyed her students just as much as they adored her. Also, Ranan discovered the Quakers (actually, his older daughter took him to them) as a very fitting support for his spiritual aspirations (which had made a start under the example of his wife). This would be the early years of the '70s.

From here to his retirement is the usual story of academia, but the move from Temple to St. Joe's was a good one. Good friendships with scholars - gentlemen and ladies.

For further academic details, click here for a detailed, boring resume. One of Ranan's recent hobbies, dealing witha mathematical curiosity can be read about by clicking here. All this is in academics. For greater details of Ranan's life, ask his daughters nicely for a biography he wrote for them. Parts of his spiritual journey is described in an article, "A Hindu among Quakers" which appeared in a Quaker publication entitled, "Non-Christian Quakers".

There is an interesting offshoot people should know about. Ranan's interest in the Vedanta (one of the Indian philosophical systems) had been bolstered by an interpretation of the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem which indicates that a complete theory of the universe can be approached arbitrarily close by scientific theories but never reached by it - sort of like the relationship between reals and rationals. But in his mind there was no good bridge between science and Vedanta. This was changed when he read a book by his friend, Amit Goswami, entitled, "The Self Aware Universe - how Consciousness gives rise to the Material World". The idea was that consciousness is not a product of the material brain but an independent entity (analogy: the EM field is independent of Newtonian Mechanics). The quantum mechanical waves of probability is collapsed into reality through the action of consciousness. For details, interested people should turn to this web site, run by some aficionados of this point of view. Ranan has a bunch of articles here. Your attention is drawn to these as an introduction to Ranan as he is now.

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