Professor Jagat Narain Kapur (was born in Delhi on 7 September 1923. He had an excellent educational career securing first class first in BA honours (1942) and MA (1944) of Delhi University and obtained his Ph.D. in 1958. He began his teaching career at the Hindu College of Delhi University and became the head of the mathematics and statistics department for 15 years. He later moved to the Delhi University as reader in mathematics for 2 years before moving over to IIT Kanpur as senior professor of mathematics for 20 long years.

Kapur made significant contributions to flows of fluid jets, flows of viscous compressible fluids, gas dynamics, shock waves, superposability of fluid flows, viscoelastic fluids, hydromagnetic channel flows, hydromagnetic shocks, hydromagnetic turbulence, and hydromagnetic lubrication. His contributions of special interest relate to internal ballistics of solid fuel rockets, orthodox and recoilless guns, and to laws of burning and general theories for composite and multilayer charges. He has also done original work in operations research. He has published over 300 papers which also include the areas of general population dynamics, difference equation models, population models with time delays, prey-predator and competition models, mathematical bioeconomics, biomechanics, and social sciences/decision sciences/financial mathematics. He has written a large number of books on school mathematics, college-level text books, general and advanced level books on mathematics and NCERT books. His writings also include a large number of popular articles on mathematics education and general education. He was chief editor of Mathematics Student, Bulletin of Mathematics Association of India, and UGC journals on mathematics education.

He was also a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and was president of the Indian Society of Agricultural Statistics, Indian Mathematical Society and the Mathematics Section of Indian Science Congress. He passed away in Delhi on 4 September 2002.