Rangasami Lakshminarayana Kashyap

R. L. Kashyap was professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University and served without pay as director of SAKSHI, the Sri Aurobindo Kapali Sastry Institute of Vedic Culture. He made basic contributions both to machine pattern recognition and to the study of the Vedas. He was named for the Padma Shri in 2021 in the field of literature and education, from Karnataka ^[1].

Engineer

Kashyap was born on 28 March 1938 ^[2]. He studied at National College and Central College in Bangalore and at the Indian Institute of Science, and took his PhD at Harvard in 1966 as a Gordon McKay fellow ^[2]. His doctoral work on what became the Ho–Kashyap algorithms, done in 1965, is still cited in textbooks ^[2].

Over 33 years at Purdue he guided 50 PhD students, published more than 250 research papers and was associate director of its Centre for Intelligent Manufacturing ^[2]. He received the King-Sun Fu award for pattern recognition and the J. C. Bose award in 1991 ^[2].

Vedic scholar

Kashyap translated into English all four of the oldest collections of Vedic verse, the Rig Veda, the Krishna and Shukla Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda, some 25,000 verses in all ^[2]. He carried forward the work of Sri Aurobindo and Kapali Sastry on the deeper meaning of the mantras ^[2]. He wrote about 50 short books in English explaining the hymns, many of which have been translated into Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi and Marathi ^[2]. At SAKSHI he held weekly classes on the Vedas ^[2].

The Indian Institute of Science named him a distinguished alumnus in 2010, and the Karnataka government gave him the Rajyotsava Award in 2012 ^[2].

Kashyap died in November 2022 ^[3].