Thyagaraju Chelluri

Thyagaraju, known to family and friends simply as Raju, was the first child of Chelluri C.A. Sastri and Chelluri Parvati. He was born on December 18, 1977 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. He was a happy and mischievous child with bright eyes; it was easy to guess that he would be a very intelligent kid. And so he turned out to be. By the time he was of school-going age, the family had moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and that's where he had his schooling except for Grade 4, which he did in Ithaca, NY, USA, where his father spent a year on sabbatical leave. He thoroughly enjoyed that year -- not just the school, where he was one of the top students, but also extracurricular activities such as Karate, Scouts, violin, and swimming. He also had plenty of friends as well as his little brother Narsimham (Narsa) to play with. It was with reluctance that he returned to Halifax at the end of the year. As he passed through elementary, junior high, and high school, his passions became more and more sharply defined: mathematics, music, and chess. (He played soccer in the summer and went swimming occasionally.) In chess, he was the provincial champion in Grades 9 and 10 and represented Nova Scotia at the National Championships. He loved the game so much that he would spend six, seven hours at a time analyzing the games of the masters and would say he wanted to make his living as a chess player. He also loved mathematics and music immensely -- he used to play Jazz on the saxophone -- but when it was pointed out that it is extremely hard to excel in three different areas simultaneously and that he would be better off focusing on just two of them, he listened, and decided to concentrate on mathematics and music. He never played chess competitively again. But mathematics -- he just loved it. Indeed, he was besotted with it: whenever he came home from college for holidays, after dinner, around 9 or 9:30, he would clear the table and spread his math papers and books and, arming himself with a glass of Coke -- that was his one vice -- and some popcorn, he would start doing mathematics into the wee hours of the morning, sometimes till six. When he was asked why he worked so hard, instead of relaxing during the vacation, he would smile and say that mathematics was a form of entertainment for him and that he really enjoyed the work he did. And he used to play his saxophone for one hour every day without fail until he became ill, at which time he did it only sporadically.

He did very well as an undergraduate at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, the place where he had studied Grade 4. He was a member of the Cornell Jazz Band throughout his undergraduate days. More details about his stay at Cornell can be found on the Chelluri Lecture page.

Raju went to graduate school at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and he did quite well there also. He specialized in analytic number theory, and his supervisor, Henryk Iwaniec, a world-renowned number theorist, thought highly of him and had every expectation that he would do something fundamental. Unfortunately, however, while he was working on his thesis -- he was twenty-five years old then -- Raju was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (Bipolar I), and things started to go downhill rapidly. He was heavily medicated and suffered greatly not only because of the powerful up-down swings caused by the illness but also because of the strong side effects of his medication. On top of all that was the pressure associated with finishing the thesis. The forces that pulled him down were so powerful that they led to his demise at the cruelly young age of 26, on August 21, 2004. He was awarded the Ph.D degree posthumously.

What was Raju like? First of all, he was fiercely honest, but he was also gentle, mild, and very shy. Up until the time he became ill, he was a happy, easygoing guy. He had a wonderful smile, and a fine sense of humor. He enjoyed jokes and humorous writing and would himself sometimes tell jokes. He couldn't bear to see anyone suffer -- not just human beings but animals or even insects. He had a strong sense of justice, and even though he was only a graduate student, he gave money regularly to Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International and worked as a volunteer for Amnesty, writing letters, even while ill, urging heads of state to release political prisoners. In short, to put it in Bertrand Russell's words, he possessed the twin virtues of clear thinking and kindness.