Vijay Raghunath Pandharipande (August 7, 1940 – January 3, 2006) was an Indian-Americanphysicist, who played a leading role in the development of the nuclear many-body problem.
In recognition of his fundamental contributions to determining the structure of light nuclei by solving the Schrödinger problem with more than three nucleons using realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions supplemented by three-body forces, Pandharipande was awarded the prestigious Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics of the American Physical Society in 1999.[3]
His son, Rahul Pandharipande is a leading mathematician working on algebraic geometry.