Jayant Narlikar

Jayant Vishnu Narlikar (b. 1938), co-architect with Fred Hoyle of the Hoyle-Narlikar theory (1964), a conformal reformulation of gravity that attempts to incorporate Mach's principle. Returned from Cambridge to India in 1972 to join the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, and in 1988 founded the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) at Pune, which became the principal pan-Indian training institute for observational and theoretical astronomy. Padma Vibhushan 2004; UNESCO Kalinga Prize 1996. Also a widely-read science populariser in both English and Marathi.