Subramania Ranganathan (Chemist) Age, Death, Wife, Children, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Subramania Ranganathan

• Subramania Ranganathan was from the state of Tamil Nadu.
  

  A young Subramania Ranganathan

• After completing his postgraduate studies at the University of Madras, he worked at the biochemistry department of the Central Leather Research Institute for a brief period.

• He received the Sloan Kettering Foundation Fellowship for doctoral studies. He joined Professor Harold Shechter’s laboratory at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, USA, and received his Ph.D in 1962.

• He was a member of the prestigious and oldest academic honour society, Phi Beta Kappa.

• He worked with Professor Robert Burns Woodward (Nobel Laureate) at his laboratory at Harvard University (1962-1964) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Woodward Research Institute in Basel, Switzerland (1964-1966).
  

  Subramania Ranganathan at the Woodward Institute, Basel, Switzerland

• Ranga had high regard for Prof. R. B. Woodward and he liked to dress in blue like his mentor.

• He played an important role in the development of Woodward-Hoffman rules. He worked on the the total synthesis of Cephalosporin C which was the Nobel Lecture of Woodward.

• He joined the chemistry department of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) as a professor in 1966.

• He published his first book, Fascinating Problems in Organic Reaction Mechanisms, in 1967. This book was mentioned several times in international journals.
  

  The cover page of Subramania Ranganathan’s first book

• He met his wife, Darshan Ranganathan, briefly at a symposium in 1969 and he later informed about his wish to marry her through a letter.

• After his marriage in 1970, his wife joined him at IITK as a research fellow. They shared the laboratory and students but they worked on different research domains.

• He expressed his ideas best through origami and art, and he co-authored books, ‘Art in Organic Synthesis’ (1970) with Nitya Anand and Jasjit S Bindra and ‘Art in Biosynthesis’ (1976) with Darshan Ranganathan.
  

  Origami models of platonic solids made by Subramania Ranganathan

• He wrote over a dozen books, some co-authored with his wife, Darshan Ranganathan, such as Challenging Problems in Organic Reaction Mechanisms (1972) and Further Challenging Problems in Organic Reaction Mechanisms (1980).
  

  The cover page of the book, Challenging Problems in Organic Reaction Mechanisms, by Darshan Ranganathan and Subramania Ranganathan

• He and his wife co-edited and published a monthly newsletter, Current Organic Chemistry Highlights, from 1971 to 1979. It was typed, hand-drawn, cyclostyled (a process prevalent before photocopying), stapled, and mailed by both.

• Ranga and Darshan rode bicycles to work at IITK.

• He liked to read and was often found reading a book outside his laboratory, whenever a power failure happened.

• He retired as the Dean (Professor-in-Charge, Faculty Affairs) of IITK in 1994.

• He was popular as a teacher who combined art and humour in his teaching and took various courses ranging from general chemistry to frontiers of biology.
  

  Subramania Ranganathan during a lecture

• He gave open-book tests without any time stipulation as he believed the students benefitted more from this than the conventional examinations.

• He was the Senior Scientist at the Regional Research Laboratory or RRL (now renamed the National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science and Technology or CSIR-NIIST) in Thiruvananthapuram from 1994 to 1998.

• He suffered from brain tuberculosis during 1995-96 from which he recovered and by 1998, he and his wife joined the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (now CSIR-IICT) in Hyderabad.

• He played a significant role in the founding of the Indian Society of BioOrganic Chemists (ISBOC) and stayed as its president from its establishment in 1994 till 2002.

• He was the honorary professor of Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore from 1998.

• His research covered over 15 domains of carbon science such as organic and inorganic chemistry, bioorganic and bio-inorganic chemistry, DNA recognition, protein engineering, crystal engineering, and chemical topology.

• There are over 200 peer-reviewed articles, 97 of which are available on the online repository of the Indian Academy of Sciences.

• Some of his journals based on origami were published in Resonance – Journal of Science Education published by the Indian Academy of Sciences in the years 2000, 2002, and 2003.

• He won the first prize in an All-India Cultural competition for his painting named, Cell, awarded to him by renowned artist M. F. Husain.
  

  The Award-winning painting of Subramania Ranganathan

• He showcased an art exhibition of 40 of his paintings, which the President of ModEurop (the official trend-fashion platform of the German Shoe Institute) Md Sadiq inaugurated.

• In 2000, he and his wife registered an educational society called Vidyanantha to encourage education, art, and culture among students.

• After his wife died in 2001, he continued his research at the CSIR-IICT, along with the guidance of Darshan’s PhD students.

• He conducted several seminars, lectures and chemical demonstrations across India, sometimes along with his son, Anand Ranganathan, to popularize chemistry.

• He was offered an apartment and laboratory facilities for research on the CSIR-IICT campus by director K. V Raghavan which the directors after him also continued.

• His colleagues, friends, and students celebrated his 80th birthday in 2014 by delivering lectures on different topics of organic chemistry and paying tributes.
  

  Subramania Ranganathan with his colleagues and students on his 80th birthday

• He had great memory power that on his friends’ insistence during his 80th birthday celebration, he recited the famous Gettysburg speech of Abraham Lincoln.

• He worked as an honorary scientist at the CSIR-IICT in Hyderabad until he died in  2016.

• On 28 December 2015, he broke a bone after a fall in his apartment in Hyderabad. His son, Anand Ranganathan and his wife, Sheetal Ranganathan shifted him to a hospital in New Delhi for further treatment.

• He passed away on 8 January 2016 while under treatment in the hospital.

• All his paintings are the properties of the educational society, Vidyanantha, after his death.