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In June 1965, American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer — the inventor of the atomic bomb — wrote a letter to a theoretical physicist at the University of Madras in Chennai inviting the young Indian scientist to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Her name was Thayyoor K. Radha, or T.K. Radha. She was one of the first women of colour at the institute, a place that was known as one of the most prestigious centres for theoretical research and intellectual enquiry in the world. Why, then, do we not know about her work as a pioneering Indian women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math)?
Thayyoor was born in Kerala in British India at a time when it was not the norm to educate girls beyond high school. The fourth of five children, she was an exception among her sisters in pursuing higher education at the Presidency College in Madras (now Chennai) — her father's alma mater and the only college that would admit her at the time. Despite having the highest marks in mathematics, she wanted to pursue physics, and received a gold medal for her work at the Presidency College.
This was in the 1950s and the study of particle physics was still at a nascent stage in India. Thayyoor met the Indian physicist Alladi Ramakrishnan — the founder of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai — at this time. Ramakrishnan had decided to start a course in theoretical physics at the University of Madras in Chennai around the same time, and this brought Thayyoor in Ramakrishnan's orbit. "There were three other girls at that time," Thayyoor recalled in an interview given to archivist Caitlin Rizzo in 2024. "We all knew of each other and were waiting for one another to join."
No one in Chennai had worked on particle physics yet at the time. But Ramakrishnan was aware of the fast-expanding field, and he knew Homi J. Bhabha — the founder of the Indian nuclear programme — who ran the Tata Institute in Mumbai (then Bombay). Bhabha was able to get each of the young women a paper on particle physics, and they spent the next three months studying and learning about advanced concepts like complex variables — which they had no understanding of before. It was the beginning of Thayyoor's lifelong fascination with particle physics.
Over the next few years, Thayyoor published a set of fourteen papers, all related to particle physics, Feynman propagators, and particle interactions. By the mid-1960s, she had made a name for herself in the field, and received that fateful invitation from Oppenheimer to visit the Institute for Advanced Study for a year from September 1965 to April 1966.
The institute was an extraordinary place. Here, Thayyoor was able to interact with stalwarts like Sergio Piero Fubini (one of the pioneers of string theory), Freeman Dyson (British-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, and engineering after whom the hypothetical megastructure Dyson Sphere was named), and Oppenheimer himself while she was there.
The same year, however, Thayyoor met her would-be husband Professor Vembu Gourishankar in Edmonton, Canada, while giving a seminar at the physics department of the University of Alberta. Soon, they married and Thayyoor moved to Canada. Although the University of Alberta offered her an assistant professorship, she was already pregnant with her first child by then, and the absence of adequate child care and a difficult second pregnancy forced her to leave work.
Almost a decade later, in 1973, she started taking computing courses at the University of Alberta, and again, she was at the top of her class. The physics department immediately sought to hire her as they needed a programmer who could do numerical analysis. As one of the only scholars who knew both physics and computing, Thayyoor excelled at this role, and got the job immediately. For the next 16 years, from 1976 till 1992, she worked as a programmer, helping physicists at the University with numerical computations. She would sometimes contribute her own ideas to their projects, which led to her being listed as co-author on several publications during this time.
In 2023, Thayyoor's early achievements and contributions in the field of particle physics was rediscovered when archivist Caitlin Rizzo was researching IAS' lesser-known histories with a focus on the earliest women of colour at the Institute.
It would be easy to lament Thayyoor's life as one lost to circumstances, but this is a story of resilience and triumph — of an early Indian woman pioneer's willingness and ability to rise past life's obstacles and break through glass ceilings.
Learn more about T.K. Radha's life and work here.
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