Prabhu Lal Bhatnagar

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Prabhu Lal Bhatnagar (8 August 1912 – 5 October 1976), popularly known as P. L. Bhatnagar, was an Indian mathematician best known for the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook (BGK) collision model used in lattice Boltzmann methods. He was born in Kota, Rajasthan, the second of five sons, and studied at Rampura, Herberter College, and Maharaja’s College in Jaipur, where he earned a top BSc in 1935 followed by an MSc. He began research at Allahabad University on summability theory and later worked with Amiya Charan Banerjee on differential equations; some of their work was noted in Erich Kamke’s book. In 1939 he earned a DPhil with a thesis on the Origin of the Solar System and joined St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, where he spent 16 years researching white dwarfs with Meghnad Saha and Daulat Singh Kothari. As a Fulbright scholar, he went to Harvard in 1952 to study nonlinear gases with Donald Menzel and Hari Kesab Singh. In 1954 his work with Gross and Krook produced the BGK collision model, influential in kinetic theory and later in lattice Boltzmann methods. He was elected a fellow of INSA (1950) and the Indian Academy of Sciences (1955). In 1956 he became the founding Professor of the Department of Applied Mathematics at the Indian Institute of Science, where he also explored non-Newtonian fluids and helped establish the Indian National Mathematics Olympiad. He received the Padma Bhushan in 1968. Later he served as Vice-Chancellor of Rajasthan University, Jaipur (1969) and headed the Mathematics Department at Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla (1971). He was a member of the Union Public Service Commission and the first Director of the Mehta Research Institute (now Harish-Chandra Research Institute). Bhatnagar died of a heart attack in Allahabad in 1976; his wife had died in 1973.