RIP Bikash Sinha

I am saddened to hear of the death of Bikash Sinha, who was a nuclear physicist from India who rose to the role of the director of major research institutes (Variable Energy Cyclotron Centre and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics).  I remember him from a visit to India – I think to a conference in Shimla in 2005 – where he was kindly hospitable to me and the other English visitor, especially when the latter was suffering from food poisoning.  At that time, he was already a bigwig in the Indian research world, and it was, I think, my only direct interaction with him.  In reading his obituaries (In the Indian Telegraph and via Facebook friends who knew him) I learnt that he spend some of his early career in King's College, London, back in the day when nuclear physics was more widely studied in the UK.  He was, like me, a theorist, and he was closely involved in optical potential theory.  He might have been interested to know that some of the current work in the group is on optical potential theory, using some quite different methods to those Sinha used in the 70s, but nevertheless, showing that the problem is still a current one. 

Here is the picture in a direct link to the Telegraph of India file (so if it stops showing in later years, it'll be because they've removed access to the file!)