Prof. Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri

                              Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri ( অমল কুমার রায়চৌধুরী )  who is famous for his Raychaudhuri Equation in the history of science, his life is my story. After completed his M.Sc. , he joined as a research scholar in IACS but as a experimentalist on X-ray crystallography  but he was an expert in theory. As usual he lost his interest and assistantship both. So normally he was depressed because four year of his youth have been spent and he were unable to do anything and lost his self confidence.  

          Then Raychaudhuri took up a teaching job at Asutosh College ( Calcutta ) to stabilizing his financial situation. But his mind always wondered how to start again research. Then he again switched over to mathematics. Then he approached to a mathematician N.R.SEN at Calcutta University offering to work gratis under his supervision. Raychaudhuri had developed an interest in Einstein General Theory of Relativity. Though Prof. N.R.Sen was not enthusiastic but he did encourage to published his first paper in the bulletin of Calcutta Mathematical Society. This was a big boost to his confidence. New idea of study came fast but he was frustrated by Sen conservative approach to research.Then the only option left to him was to work independently.

                Raychaudhuri began with a study of neighbouring paths of free particle and light rays with a very general curved space-time , without assuming that such a space-time emerged from the Einstein's equation. Do these paths converged together or do they diverge away from one another. Convergence would imply  , a bit indirectly perhaps the existence of a genuine space-time singularity. Divergence, in contrast , would enable particles to avoid the spikiness of space-time. The answer emerged through a wonderful equation , now famous as the Raychaudhuri equation, which provides the most general geometrical criteria for convergence or divergence of paths (Geodesics ) in a general curved space-time.

Do you want to know how he became Prof. Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri ? I will tell you the whole story. Please stay with me.