Veeravalli S. Varadarajan (born May 1937) is a mathematician at UCLA who has worked in many areas of mathematics, including Lie group

Lie group

In mathematics, a Lie group is a group which is also a differentiable manifold, with the property that the group operations are compatible with the smooth structure...

s and their representations

Group representation

In the mathematical field of representation theory, group representations describe abstract groups in terms of linear transformations of vector spaces; in particular, they can be used to represent group elements as matrices so that the group operation can be represented by matrix multiplication...

, quantum mechanics, differential equations, and supersymmetry. He introduced Kostant–Parthasarathy–Ranga Rao–Varadarajan determinant

Determinant

In linear algebra, the determinant is a value associated with a square matrix. It can be computed from the entries of the matrix by a specific arithmetic expression, while other ways to determine its value exist as well...

s in 1967 and Enright–Varadarajan modules in 1975.

He was awarded the Onsager Medal

Onsager Medal

The Onsager Medal is a scholastic presentation and award given on behalf of the Lars Onsager Family to a lecturer or professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The medal, designed by Harald Wårvik, commemorates the efforts of a single individual as chosen by the Onsager...

 in 1998 for his work.

Biography

Varadarajan received his undergraduate degree in 1956 from Presidency College, Madras, and his doctorate in 1959 from the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta, under the supervision of Calyampudi R. Rao. After brief periods at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), and the University of Washington, Seattle, he joined the Department of Mathematics at UCLA.