Ashutosh Mukherjee

Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee (1864 to 1924) was a Bengali mathematician who became one of the most influential lawyers, judges and university builders of colonial India. Born in Calcutta into a Brahmin family, he took a master's degree in mathematics in 1885 and a second one in natural sciences in 1886, the first student of Calcutta University to hold both. As a young man he published research in British journals, and his 1886 note on elliptic functions drew praise from Arthur Cayley. He also worked on the geometry of conics and confocal ellipses. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh at 22, founded the Calcutta Mathematical Society in 1908 and led it until 1923. After about 1893 he turned mainly to law, serving as a judge of the Calcutta High Court from 1904, and as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta he turned it into a research university, appointing scholars such as C. V. Raman.