Abhijit Guha in Cambridge Fellows' Register

Abhijit Guha living in Lord Rutherford's House

Lord Rutherford's House

Abhijit Guha living in Stephen Hawking's House (PhD Degree Day)

Abhijit Guha living in Stephen Hawking's House (PhD Degree Day)

After obtaining a PhD from Trinity College Cambridge and before joining University of Bristol, Dr Abhijit Guha spent several years as a Fellow at Gonville & Caius College. He first stayed in Prof Stephen Hawking's house in Little St. Mary's Lane (behind the 'GradPad'), and then moved to the Newnham Cottage (which was the residence of the famous Lord Rutherford**) situated in the Harvey Court with a magnificent lawn in the front and a garden on the side. It was a real privilege to have regular interactions, including lunches and High-Table dinners, with the likes of Nevill Mott (Nobel Laureate), Stephen Hawking (Lucasian Prof), Sam Edwards (Cavendish Prof), David Shoenberg (FRS), Peter Gray (Master, FRS), David Tabor (FRS) and similarly distinguished Fellows of many disciplines. In 1348 Edmund Gonville bought a piece of land and left money in his will, but it was not until 1490 that Gonville Court was built. Later, in 1557, John Caius, a student of Gonville College, refounded his old college as Gonville & Caius (pronounced as "Keys"). The College has three gates symbolising the progress of the students through the university. The student enters through the simple and plain Gate of Humility. (The word "humilitatis" is carved on the gate.) In the middle is the large and austere Gate of Virtue, built in the renaissance classical style. Last but not the least is the ornate Gate of Honour, with its sun-dials and dome. The student passes through it straight into the Senate House to receive the degree. By 2008 the College have had 12 Nobel Laureates, which is the second highest total (Trinity College Cambridge occupies the first position) out of all colleges in Cambridge or Oxford, including James Chadwick (discovery of neutron), Nevill Mott (electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, Mott transition), Francis Crick (double helix as the structure for DNA), Max Born (quantum mechanics, statistical interpretation of wavefunction), Howard Florey (discovery of penicillin and its curative effect, sharing with Alexander Fleming and EB Chain) and Antony Hewish (discovery of pulsars). The alumni of the College include Homi Bhabha, John Conway, Ronald Fisher, John Venn, George Green and William Harvey. In 1628 William Harvey published a book "On the motion of the heart and blood" that contained a detailed and comprehensive description of the systemic circulation. Since then the College has retained its excellence in research. Stephen Hawking is a Fellow of this college, who has become a legend during his lifetime. The link below gives a presentation on the college life including music from the Caius Choir, with some magnificent new pictures of the College by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Photographer in Residence, Dan White.

Caius_College_Life Slide Show
Gonville & Caius College website

** Historical note: Prof David Shoenberg, the famous Professor of low temperature physics, on his visit to A Guha's residence in Newnham Cottage in 1995 made interesting recollections of his earlier visits to the Newnham Cottage in the 1930's to attend Rutherford's afternoon tea parties.    British Society for History of Mathematics web-site notes:   "Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), who succeeded J J Thomson as Cavendish professor in 1919, lived at Newnham Cottage, Queen's Road from 1919 to his death in 1937, caused by falling from a tree he was pruning in the garden."

Photo: Abhijit Guha receiving the PhD Degree from the Vice-Chancellor at the Degree Ceremony Day

Matriculation Photo of Abhijit Guha at Trinity College

Photo: Abhijit Guha living in Butler House, Trinity College

Abhijit Guha received his PhD degree in Engineering from Trinity College. He was the Prince of Wales Scholar (this Scholarship for 3 years is given by Trinity College to the best candidate of all commonwealth countries out of all subject disciplines). During this period he was also an Honorary Nehru Scholar (this scholarship is awarded by Nehru Trust to about 10 PhD students from all over India in all disciplines). He later became a Senior Rouse Ball Scholar at Trinity College, which is bestowed upon a work which "has greatly impressed the Electors by its quality and promise in an area of research which is worthy of continued support". Trinity College is the most famous of Cambridge colleges with 32 Nobel Laureates (up to 2009). As an example, Sir Andrew Huxley, who was the Master of the college during the first phase of Abhijit Guha's time at the college is a Nobel Laureate. The college also has had similarly top-ranking mathematicians. (There is no Nobel Prize in the field of mathematics,  Fields Medal is considered of the same stature - for example, Sir Michael Atiyah, who was the Master of the college during the second phase of Abhijit Guha's time at the college, is a Fields Medalist. He also won the Abel Prize in 2004.) Of the current Fellows of the College in 2011, there are 4 Nobel Prize winners, 3 Fields Medalists, 37 FRS and 22 FBA's, additionally 3 Honorary Fellows are Nobel Laureates.  King Henry VIII founded the college in 1546. Issac Newton is its most famous member on whose statue the following words are inscribed "Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit". James Clark Maxwell (one of the greatest theoretical physicists ever and the first Cavendish Professor), Ernest Rutherford (one of the greatest pioneers of subatomic physics), GI Taylor (the great fluid dynamicist famous for his statistical theory of turbulence; he also proposed in 1934 the idea of dislocation in crystals), Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley (giving the physico-chemical explanation of the transmission of nerve impulses), Charles Babbage (who built the forerunner of modern computers), WH Fox Talbot (an inventor of photography), Ludwig Wittgenstein (one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century writing Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 1921 and Philosophical Investigations 1953) are all "Trinity Men", as are Francis Bacon, Alfred Tennyson, Lord Byron, Amartya Sen, Lord Rayleigh, JJ Thomson, William Bragg, Niels Bohr, Arthur Eddington, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, Alfred Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, John Littlewood, Godfrey H Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. GH Hardy, in his book A Mathematician's Apology (and CP Snow in its Foreword), has immortalised the Trinity tradition in mathematics and the Hardy-Ramanujan legend. The picture on the right is of the iconic fountain which is in the middle of the Great Court which is the largest court in Cambridge or Oxford. The challenge is to complete a rectangular path surrounding the fountain as the college clock strikes twelve (Film: Chariots of Fire). The Nevile's Court is smaller in dimension and is lined by the Wren Library which was completed in 1695 to the design of Sir Christopher Wren. The library has many special collections including the Capell collection of early Shakespeare editions, AA Milne's manuscripts of Winnie-the-Pooh, and many books from Sir Issac Newton's own library including preliminary manuscripts for Issac Newton's 1687 Principia, several early editions of the book and the correspondence between Issac Newton and Richard Bentley on Principia. On the roof of the Wren Library are four statues representing Divinity, Law, Physics and Mathematics. The legend is that Newton determined the speed of sound by measuring the time that a hand-clap took to reflect in a corridor of the Nevile's Court. At the back of Trinity is the magnificent The Avenue - the road through a continuous living arch formed by two colonnades of lime and cherry trees on both sides - that connects the New Court to the Fellows Garden on the other side of Queen's Road, going over the river Cam and through The Backs. On the other side of the Fellows Garden there are student hostels including the Butler House on Grange Road, in which A Guha resided during his first year at Cambridge. The impressive main entrance to Trinity College, the Great Gate, has a statue of Henry VIII holding a ------ in his hand (find out what when you next visit Trinity!).

Trinity College website
BBC's panoramic view of the Great Court

Trinity Plan

Newton

Great Gate

Great Court

Fountain

Nevile's Court/ Wren Library

The Avenue

Punting on River Cam

Other than Trinity and Caius, Abhijit Guha is also implicitly associated  to two other very distinguished Cambridge colleges - St. John's  and Churchill - both of them had offered him to become a Fellow. Although AG finally joined Caius as a Fellow, he gratefully acknowledges the honoured opportunity simultaneously provided by St. John's and Churchill. Churchill is one of the newer colleges distinguishing in science and engineering, and St. John's  is the college of Paul Dirac. (Dirac was educated at Bristol, was one of the leaders in quantum mechanics and predicted the existence of positron for which he received the Nobel Prize. He shared the Nobel Prize 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger with the citation: "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory".)

This is Cambridge's world-famous turbomachinery laboratory, named after Frank Whittle - one of the inventors of the jet engine for aircraft propulsion. Whittle Laboratory is a part of the Engineering Department but situated outside the city centre, by the side of Madingley Road. Abhijit Guha was fortunate to be at this laboratory during its "golden period"**, its academic members included a catalogue-full of famous people and pioneers in the field - Sir William Hawthorne (FRS), Sir John Horlock (FRS), John Denton (FRS), Denis Whitehead, Nick Cumpsty, John Young, Bill Dawes, Tom Hynes, Howard Hodson and Ivor Day, and the laboratory was frequently visited by luminaries across the world, e.g. Edward Greitzer of the MIT Gas Turbine Laboratory or Claus Sieverding of the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics. There was constant and vigorous interaction with engine manufacturers like Rolls-Royce and GE, and other industries. There was a community culture inside the laboratory with professors, students and technicians taking tea/coffee together at 11am and 4pm, and many walking together to the nearby cafeteria at Cavendish Laboratory for lunch. John Denton was one of the pioneers in the field of time-marching CFD techniques and would readily give all members of the laboratory access to his computer codes (very expensive top-selling products); similarly Bill Dawes's viscous CFD codes were available to laboratory members when needed. This atmosphere of co-operation helped to sustain and amplify excellence and world-leadership. A nostalgic reunion took place in 2003 to mark the laboratory's 30th anniversary.

** As described by John Denton in his speech on the 30th anniversary.

Picture of Silver Mug presented to Abhijit Guha by Whittle Laboratory, Cambridge University
Whittle Laboratory website

Add to the list of the luminaries at Whittle Laboratory mentioned above, the likes of Profs Ffowcs-Williams (RAE Whittle Medal), Ann Dowling (FRS), Ken Bray (FRS) or Rex Britter - and one gets a contemporary picture of the thermofluids group (Division A) of the Cambridge Engineering Department during the time of Abhijit Guha at Cambridge. On top of this, was the legendary faculty at DAMTP, including GK Batchelor, David Crighton, JCR Hunt and H Huppert. It is at Cambridge that AG met many other Masters such as Sir James Lighthill (FRS), Adrian Bejan or Ascher Shapiro. Thursday 2:30 was the time for research seminars for Division A, and a long procession of bicycles used to transport the people of Whittle Laboratory to the main site at Trumpington Street (the forward and return journey being of about 4 miles). The Engineering Library had 24/7 access and borrowing facility  - even a PhD student could borrow any book at  any time (say, 4am should one so wished) on any day (including holidays), all that was needed was the filling - on trust - of the details of the borrowed items on a piece of paper which would be formalised by the library staff on the next working day. Abhijit Guha taught Two Phase Heat Transfer to final year engineering students, this gained such reputation among students that the deputy Head of Department (i.e. deputy Dean engineering faculty) wrote unprecedented Letters of Commendation  each year.

Cambridge has a long tradition of being a world-leading research centre in fluid dynamics. Starting from Issac Newton, fluid dynamicists of the absolutely highest calibre like George Stokes, G.I. Taylor, James Lighthill and George Batchelor have made the Cambridge contribution to this field distinctive. Fluid dynamicists like Osborne Reynolds have been educated at Cambridge. Cambridge has similarly nurtured pioneers and world-leaders in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – D.B. Spalding and Antony Jameson were educated at Cambridge, J.D. Denton worked there. The leading journal in the field – the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (JFM) – was founded by George Batchelor in 1956 and is published by the Cambridge University Press (CUP). Batchelor was the editor of the journal for some forty years.

The Cambridge Dimension
Cambridge has given Issac Newton and Charles Darwin. Cambridge's attainment of the summit is demonstrable from a simple but startling statistics - by 2010, 65 students of the University of Cambridge, 57 academic staff, 88 affiliates altogether have won the Nobel Prize (which is awarded since 1901). The breadth offered by Cambridge is equally awe-inspiring. The following is the summary of this feeling captured during the course of journey of one man through this university.

Cambridge provided an extraordinary atmosphere for research excellence. One not only had the access to the wisdom of the topmost experts in one’s own field, but also could have first-hand awareness about the developments and discoveries in other fields. Outside the thermofluids area mentioned above, one could also attend lectures of the likes of  Michael Ashby (FRS, FEng, h-index > 60), KL Johnson (FRS, FEng), CR Calladine (FRS, FREng) or Jim Woodhouse in other fields of engineering. Cambridge was the regular venue for lectures by international Masters in all fields - be it arts and humanities, physical-biological-social sciences, mathematics and computing, or engineering.  It is here that A Guha has attended lectures by Stephen Hawking (cosmology, imaginary time,...), Roger Penrose (cosmology, consciousness and intelligence), Edward Witten (mathematical physics, highest h-index (185 in 2016) of any living physicist), Fred Hoyle (nucleosynthesis, steady state theory, origin of life), Murray Gell-Mann (complexity), Abdus Salam (unification of forces), Benoît Mandelbrot (fractal), Michael Atiyah (knot theory, topology), Christopher Zeeman (catastrophe theory), GI Barenblatt (scaling laws, chaos), Michael Ashby (engineering design, materials selection), James Lighthill (fluid dynamics of hearing), CR Calladine (analysis of biological structures), JE Ffowcs-Williams (fluid dynamics of snoring), Jim Woodhouse (physics of musical instruments), Roddam Narasimha (turbulence, Indian space and rocket technology), JCR Hunt (turbulence), H Huppert (magma flow), William Hawthorne (turbomachinery, jet engines), Freeman Dyson, Anita Desai (reading from own novels), and Amartya Sen (development economics), among countless others (apology for the incompleteness of the list). Many in the list of speakers won the Nobel Prize/Fields Medal. All stalwarts of Whittle Laboratory presented at least one seminar each year. It was during the period 1993-1995 when Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor, both former students of University of Cambridge, created international intellectual excitement by proving the Fermat's Last Theorem.

Cambridge had an intellectual and philosophical ambience – one would discuss about Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky or Jacques Derrida, for example. A Guha, as a Fellow of Caius (a so-called 'Cambridge Don'), personally witnessed in 1992 one of the rare twentieth century spectacle of Senate Voting at University of Cambridge on whether an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree would be offered to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida known for his work on deconstruction. Cambridge also offered an international ambience – interactions with various cultures and viewpoints made one wise and tolerant.

The specialist and public lectures organized in the Lady Mitchell Hall, Babbage Lecture Theatre, Newton Institute or departmental lecture theatres are such rich sources of knowledge, analysis and critical thinking that they truly widen the horizon, enrich human life and do not let one become myopic. Other than one-off lectures by international luminaries, there are also organized series of public lectures. For example, A Guha still cherishes the superb Darwin Lecture Series as well as a set of uplifting lectures on Italian paintings and sculptures by Prof. Patrick Boyde. Since 1986, the Darwin Lecture Series is organized each year on a particular theme on which international experts in diverse fields present 8 lectures (each year) on different aspects of the common theme. This outstanding lecture series has covered topics such as "Origins", "Fragile Environment", "Discoveries", "Catastrophe", "Intelligence", "Evolution", "Colour", "Sound", "Memory", "Body", "Time", "Space", "Power", "DNA", "Evidence", "Conflict", "Survival", "Identity", "Serendipity", "Darwin", "Risk".  For a willing mind, Cambridge thus provides an unparalleled opportunity for all-round learning.  No wonder, the university has maintained its world-leading excellence for 800 years, the 800th anniversary having been celebrated in 2009.
©Abhijit Guha
Picture of Silver Mug presented to Abhijit Guha by Whittle Laboratory, Cambridge University
Commendation 1 on Two Phase Heat Transfer Course at Cambridge University (from Prof. A.P. Dowling, FRS, currently the Dean of Engineering)
Commendation 2 on Two Phase Heat Transfer Course at Cambridge University (from Prof. A.P. Dowling, FRS, currently the Dean of Engineering)

Cambridge Engineering website

Common People in Rabindranath Tagore's Poems
A critique (article in English) by Abhijit Guha, published in the magazine that accompanied the organization of UTSAV - the great celebration of Indian Culture at Cambridge in 1990, which was attended by, among others, the Indian High Commissioner.

Light Moments in Engineering
A humorous article (in English) by Abhijit Guha, published in the magazine that accompanied the organization of UTSAV - the great celebration of Indian Culture at Cambridge in 1990, which was attended by, among others, the Indian High Commissioner.

The King Who Begged
A poem  (both in English and Bengali) by Abhijit Guha, published in the magazine that accompanied the organization of UTSAV - the great celebration of Indian Culture at Cambridge in 1990, which was attended by, among others, the Indian High Commissioner.  

Kamal Pasha (mp3, click)
This is a poem written by Nazrul. The subject-matter is the description of a freedom struggle with its achievements and prices. I performed this version of the recitation at Utsav - the great celebration of Indian Culture at Cambridge in 1990, which was attended by, among others, the Indian High Commissioner.  I have given the mp3 sound file above (click the link) if you are interested, but please do not retain a copy of the mp3 file with you; if you are interested to listen to it again, please come back to this site. Apology for the sound quality and the recorded sound-level of the accompanying music.

Myself and a small team of friends at Cambridge have collected and donated the following sums of money through various activities such as street collections, organizing cultural evenings, etc. As an example, the Somalia initiative needed about three months of our time; the collected sum was sent to Somalia via Oxfam and Concern Worldwide.

£2400 (English Pounds) for cyclone victims in Bangladesh (1991) £8000 for Somalia (1992) £250 for flood victims in northern India (1993) £300 for earthquake victims in central India (1993) £145 for Rwanda (1994)

Bangladesh Concert

Somalia Street Collection

Somalia Concert

Rwanda Street Collection

Myself and a small team of friends at Cambridge established (and conducted for many years) this forum with weekly hour-long seminars on Saturday afternoons with question and answer sessions at the end. The seminars were usually held in Darwin College Colloquim Room.The objective of this forum was to  introduce various specialist topics to a general audience thereby creating cross-fertilization of ideas and enhancing mutual understanding. Mostly Indian scholars at Cambridge presented these weekly seminars, though occasionally guest speakers and visiting dignitaries were invited (for example, Prof Roddam Narasimha (FRS) - the famous professor of fluid dynamics at the Indian Institute of Science and the then Nehru Visiting Professor at Cambridge, and the honourable minister for higher education of West Bengal have spoken at the Forum). The forum also served as a great platform for socialization and various charitable activities. I presented the first-ever seminar (in 1990) at the Expert-to-Lay-Forum to set the overall tone and style for the forum, the title of the talk was "Energy Production - this century and beyond". On popular demand I repeated the same performance again on 18 March 1995.