Ziauddin Ahmad

Ziauddin Ahmad (13 February 1873 – 23 December 1947) was an Indian mathematician, parliamentarian and educationist from Meerut, a central figure of the Aligarh Movement who served as Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University in several terms — succeeding Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan for the term that began in 1935 — and sat in the Central Legislative Assembly from 1930 to 1947. ^{1 2 3} The Urdu infobox gives his birth year as 1878; the English and Arabic articles give 1873, which the museum follows with the conflict recorded. ⁴

He was born at Meerut, birth name Ziauddin Ahmed Zuberi, into the Kamboh Nawab family; his father, Hafiz Muinuddin, was a junior district employee. ¹ A mathematician in differential, projective, algebraic and analytic geometry and in the applications of logarithms, he won the Strachey Gold Medal in 1895 and an Isaac Newton Scholarship, and studied at MAO College and at Allahabad, Calcutta, Cambridge, Göttingen, Paris and Bologna. ^{1 4} He served on the Sadler Commission on Calcutta University in 1917 and on the Skeen and Shea commissions. ¹

He joined the staff of MAO College and became the first pro-vice-chancellor of the new Aligarh Muslim University in 1920, under its first vice-chancellor, the Raja of Mahmudabad. ¹ He returned as vice-chancellor on 19 April 1935, directly succeeding Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan — the sequence is given in the succession boxes of his own English and Urdu articles and of Ismail Khan's articles alike. ^{1 4 5} His first term ended on 30 April 1938, when Shah Muhammad Sulaiman succeeded him; he was appointed again on 24 April 1941, served further, and resigned in December 1946 after student protests at his reappointment, leaving Ismail Khan to hold the office again when he died the following year. ^{1 5}

He sat in the Central Legislative Assembly from 1930 until his death in 1947, latterly as the Muslim League's chief whip, and the English article credits him with a proactive role in establishing the Reserve Bank of India and the Reserve Bank of India Act 1935. ¹ He was made a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire and was knighted in the 1938 New Year Honours. ¹ His book Systems of Education: England, Germany, France and India appeared in 1929. ¹

He died in London on 23 December 1947, of pneumonia after a stroke suffered on a return flight from Australia. ^{1 2} At his wish his body was taken back to Aligarh, where students carried it to burial beside Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's grave within the university, against the administration's first choice of the university mosque; an Iqbal couplet is inscribed on his tombstone. ¹ Ziauddin University and its hospitals in Karachi were founded in his honour by his great-grandson Asim Hussain, and Aligarh's Dr. Ziauddin Ahmad Dental College and Sir Ziauddin Hall carry his name. ¹ Wikidata gives his religion only as Islam generically and no article names a school, so the museum records his affiliation as unknown. ³