Professor G. B. Mitra (1923–2017)

Professor G. B. Mitra was a rare breed of Indian crystallographer, who always loved working on the foundations of the subject. He started publishing high-quality papers in IUCr journals from the 1960s and his last paper was published in 2013. He did his PhD under the tutelage of another great crystallographer, namely Kedareswar Banerjee, who was considered the father of direct methods. He also worked with Professor A. J. C. Wilson in the Viriamu Jones laboratory, Cardiff. In the 1960s and 1970s his work on the variance method drew the attention of the crystallographic community. He was made Editor of the World Directory of Crystallographers (India chapter) in 1982. Professor Mitra was invited many times to deliver lectures in the plenary sessions of the Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography. Many of his papers are cited in International Tables for Crystallography.

Figure 1 Professor G. B. Mitra.

He was still active after his retirement from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in 1980 and guided many PhD students in the capacity of an emeritus scientist at IACS, Kolkata. Professor Mitra had worked in many fields of crystallography, including delineation of crystal structure, the phase problem, application of statistical methods in crystallography and line profile analysis. During his last few years, when he was over eighty-five, he was interested in application of the cumulant method in powder crystallography and published five papers in this field, which received worldwide appreciation. There are few persons in India who pursue research in the foundations of crystallography. With his demise a further vacuum will be felt.