Christie Jayaratnam Eliezer
About
C.J.Eliezer is a Ceylon Tamil mathematician, physicist and academic.
Born in Ceylon (Or Sri Lanka nowadays), 1918 and passed away at age 82 in Australia.
Timeline
1918: Born in Navatkuli in northern Ceylon
1926 - 1933: Received education at Wesleyan Mission School and Hartley College where he passed the Cambridge Local Examinations with honours and distinction
1935: Ceylon University College, graduating with a first class honours B.Sc. special degree in mathematics.
1935: Married and had 5 children
1939 - 43: Scholarship to study mathematics and theoretical physics at Christ's College, Cambridge.
1946: Ph.D. degree from Cambridge, produced a thesis,on spinning electron and electromagnetic field.
1949: D.Sc. degree, qualified to be allowed to argue in court on behalf of another party at Middle Temple, one of the four professional associations for barristers in England and Wales.
1949 - 57: Professor of mathematics, then Dean of the Faculty of Science, University of Ceylon.
1955 - 1956: deputy pro-vice chancellor, scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study (academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Einstein), worked with the famous physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Prevented Sinhala Only Act - the abolishment of Tamil language, replaced by English.
1959 - 63: professor of mathematics at the University of Malaya - highest ranking Malaysian institution of higher education, dean of the Faculty of Science and deputy principal and vice-chancellor
1968 - 83: the first professor of applied mathematics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He became dean of the School of Physical Sciences, then deputy vice-chancellor.
1984 - 2001: Vice-president, YMCA, Colombo branch.
1984 - 2001: President of the Ceylon Tamil Association of Victoria and chairman of the Australian Federation of Tamil Associations.
1984 - 2001: Helped Tamil refugees fleeing to Australia following the 1983 anti-Tamil Black July riots.
Works
Eliezer wrote several books and articles including:
Concise Vector Analysis (1963, Pergamon Press)
A Modern Text-book on Statics: For Students of Applied Mathematics, Physics and Engineering (1964, Pergamon Press)
Mathematics : Queen of the Arts, Handmaiden of the Sciences (1969, La Trobe University)
The First Integrals of Some Differential Equations of Dynamics (1978, La Trobe University)
Mechanics for Year Eleven (1988, co-author J. G. Barton)