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This is probably a soft question. I am interested in complex analysis, and I want to ask the first name of this person, S. Ponnusamy, whose name I wish to mention in a paper.

What is the best way to go about asking such stuff?

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  • Saminathan Ponnusamy –  Jan 14 '15 at 22:51
  • http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=u5T0rO0AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra –  Jan 14 '15 at 22:51
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    If his home page does not list his first name, perhaps he does not like to use it. So perhaps you do not need to use it. Bear in mind Indian names are often different from Western names, in that they traditionally have only 1 name, and some have been forced to have 2 names by Western culture. Some Indian mathematicians have only 1 name (e.g., Harish-Chandra), and some (one of my friends) officially have 2, but only use 1. – Kimball Jan 15 '15 at 07:01

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If you are at a university that has access to MathSciNet, then you can look up any one of his publications (listed on the web page you linked to), and then click on his name to find out that his first name is Saminathan.

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    MRef https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet-mref is a free limited version that you can use for the same job, if you provide the text of a citation that gets parsed correctly and produces a single match in Mathscinet's database (tricky to achieve sometimes, but if you insist you can get a match for at least one of the papers of that author). – Federico Poloni Feb 13 '18 at 14:24