Sharadchandra Shankar Shrikhande

Sharadchandra Shankar Shrikhande (19 October 1917 – 21 April 2020) was an Indian mathematician with notable achievements in combinatorial mathematics. He was notable for his breakthrough work along with R. C. Bose and E. T. Parker in their disproof of the famous conjecture made by Leonhard Euler dated 1782 that there do not exist two mutually orthogonal latin squares of order 4n + 2 for any n.[1] Shrikhande's specialty was combinatorics, and statistical designs. Shrikhande graph[2] is used in statistical designs.

Shrikhande received a Ph.D. in the year 1950 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the direction of R. C. Bose. Shrikhande taught at various universities in the USA and in India.[3] Shrikhande was a professor of mathematics at Banaras Hindu University, Banaras, and the founding head of the department of mathematics, University of Mumbai and the founding director of the Center of Advanced Study in Mathematics, Mumbai until he retired in 1978. He was a fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, USA.

He turned 100 in October 2017[4] and died in April 2020 at the age of 102.[5]

Shrikhande's son Mohan Shrikhande[6] is a professor of combinatorial mathematics at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.