Do you know the person in a Saree walking with Nobel laureates Julian Schwinger and Abdus Salam?

 Do you know the person in a Saree walking with Nobel laureates Julian Schwinger and Abdus Salam?

She is particle physicist TK Radha who had a brief but impressive career in the 1960s. After here PhD in IMSc, Chennai Oppenheimer invited her for a visit to IAS. She then did a postdoc with L. Schiff with Stanford.

Radha had written papers with the likes of Marshak and Schiff, and eventually received an Assistant Professorship at U of Alberta.

But she took a break from her career to care for her child and eventually dropped out of academia.

It was not the end of her academic story.

Almost a decade after dropping out of particle physics, she started taking computing courses at U of Alberta and ended at the top of her class. Because of her background, the physics department immediately hired her as a programmer.

For the next 16 years, she worked as a programmer, helping physicists 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.

In a different world, she could have had a long and illustrious career as a particle physicist.