Prasad (born 1906) and Ramala (born 1908). His son Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the most notable of his children, founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the direct precursor to the modern Bharatiya Janata Party. Rama Prasad became a judge in the High Court of Calcutta while Uma Prasad became famed as a Himalayan trekker and a travel writer - being awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for his travelogue Manimahesh. His grandson Chittatosh Mookerjee was the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court. Family history Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee was born into a Hindu Brahmin family in Kolkata, West Bengal. His ancestral town was Jirat in Hooghly District, West Bengal. His grandfather actually came to Jirat from another village named Digsui, situated also in the Hooghly District and settled down there. Sir Ashutosh's father Ganga Prasad Mukherjee was born in Jirat, Hooghly District on 16 December 1836. He was a very meritorious student and he came to Kolkata to study in Medical College with the help of the wealthy people of Jirat. Later he settled down in Bhawanipore area of Kolkata. Accomplishments as a mathematician In November 1879, at the age of fifteen, Mukherjee passed the entrance exam of the Calcutta University in which he stood second and received a first grade scholarship. In the year 1880, he took admission at the Presidency College now (Presidency University) in Kolkata where he met P.C. Ray and Narendranath Dutta who would later become famous as Swami Vivekananda. Later that year, though only a first-year undergraduate, he published his first mathematical paper, on a new proof of the 25th proposition of Euclid's first book. In 1883, Mukherjee topped the BA examination at Calcutta University to complete a postgraduate degree in mathematics. In 1883 S.N. Banerjee wrote an article in the newspaper Bengalee against the orders of the Calcutta High Court and he was arrested in contempt of court. Protests and hartals erupted across Bengal and other cities, led by a group of students headed by Mukherjee at Calcutta high court. In 1884, he won the Harishchandra Prize for academic achievements, and completed an M.A. with first-class honours in mathematics in 1885. In 1886, he was awarded a second Masters in Natural Sciences, making him the first student to be awarded a dual degree from Calcutta University. In the same year he was married to Jogomaya Devi, and also published his third mathematical paper, "A Note on Elliptic