Prof. Navjyoti Singh, Center for Exact Humanities (CEH) passed away on 3 March. IIIT-Hyderabad expresses its deepest condolences to the bereaved family of Prof. Navjyoti Singh and prays for his departed soul.

Prof. Navjyoti was one of the best minds in the country, an original thinker, daring in his thoughts and continuously pushing the frontiers of knowledge. He firmly believed that Humanities as a knowledge system is as exact and rational as any other knowledge system. His explorations spanning Philosophy, Art, Science and Technology were breathtaking in their range.

He was quite unconventional in his thoughts as well as life – as carefree as a child, yet extremely deep in his thought. He was a true polymath – a national level hockey player and swimmer, an excellent table tennis player, flutist, painter, and an adventurer who loved bike riding and traveling. He loved story-telling, some of them spontaneous too, but equally captivating!

He did his B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering (1979) and M.Tech in Nuclear Engineering (1981) from IIT-Kanpur. Though he had no formal training in Humanities, he dedicated his life working on areas like formal ontology, study of consciousness, crossroads of Science and Indian analytic traditions, history and philosophy of Science, and foundations of logic, mathematics and linguistics, purely through self-learning. In spite of no formal training, he still stands out as one of the tall figures in the area of Humanities in India.

It is for this reason, he was personally invited in 2007 by the then IIIT-H Director, Prof. Rajeev Sangal to set up Center for Exact Humanities at IIIT-H. He dedicated his life for teaching and research.