Vashishtha Narayan Singh

Vashishtha Narayan Singh (2 April 1946 – 14 November 2019) was an Indian mathematician and academic. He taught mathematics at various institutes in India between the 1960s and the 1970s. He is popular on social media for supposedly having challenged Einstein's Theory of Relativity but there are no credible sources that prove so. In the early 1970s, Singh was diagnosed with schizophrenia due to which he was repeatedly in and out of psychiatric hospitals and only returned to academia in 2014. He was posthumously awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award of India for his contributions, in 2020.

Early life and career Singh was born on 2 April 1946 to Lal Bahadur Singh, a police constable, and Lahaso Devi in the Basantpur village of the Bhojpur district in Bihar, India.

Singh was a child prodigy. He received recognition as a student when he was allowed by Patna University to appear for examination in the first year of its three-year BSc (Hons.) Mathematics course and later MSc examination the next year.

Singh joined the University of California, Berkeley in 1965 and received a PhD in Reproducing Kernels and Operators with a Cyclic Vector (Cycle Vector Space Theory) in 1969 under doctoral advisor John L. Kelley. After eight months, he joined Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Bombay where he worked on a short-term position. Later he was appointed a faculty at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Singh died on 14 November 2019 at Patna Medical College and Hospital in Patna after prolonged illness.

Awards Singh was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award of India, posthumously in 2020.

In popular culture

Filmmaker Prakash Jha announced a biographical film on Singh's life in 2018. Singh's brother Ayodhya Prasad Singh, citing pending legal guardianship issues, said that no film rights had been granted.

Publication