Noor Muhammad

Not to be confused with Mohammed Noor, a criminal police officer

Noor Muhammad (15 April 1951 – 12 April 2004) was a notable Pakistani mathematician and mathematics writer who made an original contribution to the fields of C*-algebra, symmetric topology and pure mathematics. He was the chairman of Department of Mathematics, in which he assumed this position in 2000 until 2002. He was a distinguished student of Russian mathematician dr. Grigory Barenblatt, and made significant efforts to the fields of topological algebras.

Muhammad was born in Rani Wah, Khanpur, Haripur District where he completed his high school from there. In 1971, Muhammad gained his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from University of Peshawar, followed by his Master of Science in Mathematics in 1973 from Quaid-i-Azam University. With a scholarship awarded by the Quaid-i-Azam University, Muhammad travelled to Soviet Union in 1979, and completed his thesis in 1983 under the direction of dr. Grigory Barenblatt from Moscow State University. His doctoral thesis covered the functional analysis, namely C*-algebras. He taught mathematics at the Moscow State University until 1984 and subsequently moved to Trieste, Italy the same year.

Noor Muhammad joined International Centre for Theoretical Physics on the request of prominent theoretical physics and nobel laureate in Physics Dr. Prof. Abdus Salam. As a post-doctoral fellow, he also worked on P-Commutative Topological Algebras. From 1990 until 1995, he became an associate member of mathematician at ICTP. Noor Mohammad, at ICTP, published more than 30 articles in refereed international journals during the course of his career.

He reluctantly returned to Pakistan where he joined Quaid-i-Azam University and became a chairperson of the Department of Mathematics. he produced a number of research papers on elliptic pseudo-differential operators over C*-algebras for compact manifold. He had also published papers on topics in approximation theory, derivation on topological algebras and multipliers of topological algebra.

In mathematics, functional analysis depends heavily upon topology, especially the branch of Functional Analysis that Dr. Noor Muhammad specialised in. His lectures notes on a first course on functional analysis, a copy of which is still available, are topological based. He was a close associate and colleague of dr. Qaiser Mushtaq, and had cordial relationship with him. In 2000, Dr. Noor Muhammad began to write college-level textbook on topology, however, after his death, the book is remained incompleted.

In 2003, Dr. Noor Muhammad, was diagnosed with a heart ailment. Soon after, he had heart surgery, which he barely survived. His friends and colleagues in the Department of Mathematics advised him to take at least a semester off. Dr. Qaiser Mushtaq, who became a new head of the department, managed to arrange a substitute professor Dr. Akbar Azam, who was then teaching at the Government College University.

After about a semester's respite, Dr Noor Muhammad restarted lecturing in the department. He regularly attended the meetings.

According to the Dr. Qaisar Mustaq's memoir, Dr. Noor Muhammad was very tense in the PhD Committee Meeting that he attended one day before he died. Dr Noor Muhammad could not take the pressure any more and asked for leave half way through.

Next morning, he was pronounced dead. He did not live to marry off his daughter, enjoy driving in his newly bought Toyota car, and publish his book on topology. His death has deprived the Mathematics Department, Quaid-i-Azam University, of its sole Functional Analyst.

• "An explicit projection method for a system of nonlinear variational inequalities with different (γ,r)-cocoercive mappings", by Noor Muhammad.
• "Double multipliers on topological algebras", L. A. Khan, N. Mohammad, and A. B. Thaheem, International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences. Volume 22 (1999), Issue 3, Pages 629–636.
• "A note on one-parameter groups of automorphisms", A. B. Thaheem and Noor Mohammad, International Journal of Mathematics and Mathematical Sciences
• "Best approximations in topological vector spaces" by Noor Mohammad, A. B. Thaheem – 1987