Indian American Eminent Mathematician Dr T N Subramanian passes away at 76 in Michigan in USA
Indian Mathemetician and Creator of the General Motors Portal Route 0ne passes at 76
By Ashe N Ayer
Troy City ( Detroit-Michigan), March 26 : Indian American Mathematecian and creator of the General Motors Route one portal , Dr T N Subramanian , passes away a prolonged illness in a city hospital here, family sources said.
He is survived by his wife Lalitha, his daugher Geeta Amrita Subramanian and brother TN Ashok and his son in law. Both his daughter and son in law work in lead positions in the Biden government in the USA.
Dr Subramanian, a product of IIT Mumbai where he was teaching English, Logic and Philosophy, despite being a mechanical engineer, migrated to the United States in 1979 to pursue his MS and Phd degrees in Brandeis University in Boston. After getting his doctorate , as is the practise in US universities, he had to head out to another university for his sabbatical as a teacher of mathematics in Philadelphia university. He solved complex mathematical problems with consummate ease.
After a short stint, he moved to Michagan University's Oakland University College where he taught Maths to undergraduates for more than 35 years from 1985. When the the then President George Bush cutdown funding to universities, he lost his associate professor tenureship. His department head asked him to pursue a degreee in Computer Science in Oakland university itself so that he would have a unique combination of Engineering, Maths and Computer Science.
Lucky for him that GM was looking for a person with these three degrees to build mathematical models for their stable of GM cars as more softare was being included in the cars in the internet age. He became the project head for assembling different packages of car models and putting them together as one piece with each group not knowing what the other group was doing.
Soon he was called upon the GM to create a portal and server for autofinancing that could also handle GPS systems. So Dr Subramaniam got down to work and built the server which even today handles auto financing for GM stable of cars as also their GPS systems. He retired at the age of 67 having got an extension.
Dr Subramaniam , son of a journalist father and journalist brother in India, was a brilliant student who passed out of the tamil run DTEA Schools with distinction in physics, chemistry and maths. His elective subject was sanskrit as he hailed from a very orthodox family.
Dr Subramaniam soon achieved fame in the US with his Route one portal and was interviewed by several technical journals on why and how the idea was born to streamlining autofinancing and keep a neat paper trail. His father was an eminent journalist TS Nilakantan , an economic journalist, who rose in the ranks to become the CEO and Managing Editor of India's premier news agency PTI. His father was known to prime ministers Mrs Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, Finance Minister TT Krishnamachari, Andhra Chief Minister Dr Chenna Reddy , and Tamil Nadu govenor K K Shah on a first name basis among others like Dr Karan Singh and Mr V C Shukla. In the embassy circuit, he was very close to both Indian ambassadors Dr Kenneth K Galbraith and Chester Bowles.
Dr Subramanaian , known as TN to his IIT colleagues , became famous with the Films Division's iconic documentary "I am 20", that interviewed several youths who had attained the age of 20 in 1967 and what they thought of India in the present and in the future. Dr Subramanian, who was the anchor of the programme said India had a great future and all qualified engineers should stay back in India to build a modern industrialised nation. The documentary happened to catch the eye of the then Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi who identfied him and wrote a personal letter to him encouraging him for his views and said " India would be proud of you one day." He certainly did her proud rising high in the USA.
While on a tour to Maharashtra, Mrs Gandhi took time off in Mumbai, visited the IIT and met with him personally to congratulate him on his views and he later told his colleagues in IIT how ectatic that moment was for him. Dr Jai Ram Ramesh, former Union Minister in the UPA cabinet, who was his junior in IIT mumbai, was one of his admirers and wrote about the letter Mrs G wrote to Dr Suibramaniam in one of his books on Mrs G to describe how the prime minister kept contact with the brightest minds in the colleges in India.
Dr Subramanian hails from an orthodox tamil brahmin family from Tirunelveli and Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu where his father and mother hailed from in Tamil Nadu. He was an avid reader of books especially spy novels like John Le Carre, Ellery Queen, and historicals like Gibbons Rise and Fall of the Roman empire and The Fall of the 3rd reich. His hobby was to study the word war 2 battles and he could describe each theater of war from Rommels to George Patton to Eishenhover and other generals of the allied forces.
He was also a good singer and launched the inter collegiate Mood Indigo inter collegiate festival in Mumbai which holds good even today 40 years after he inaugurated it. His favourite singer was Kishore Kumar and he could mimick his voice.
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