The boy walked up as his name was called out. Clad in a navy blue crested blazer with a blue-and-white striped tie pointing at his starched white pants, he stepped up to meet the high school principal, towering above him. Back in the mid-seventies at the Catholic St Joseph's Boys High School in Bangalore, India, this was a common prelude to a ritual caning by the Reverend Hedwig Da Costa for juvenile transgressions like talking in class, showing up late for school, or distracting other students. But this wasn't the time for one of those benedictions.

'Joy Aloysius Thomas—General Proficiency, Science, Mathematics, Geography, History, Civics, English Language, English Literature,' the announcer reads off, inhaling twice in the middle and eager to reach the end. The boy strides across the stage of the concert hall, slightly stooped, as though a tad embarrassed for appropriating every one of the annual academic distinctions available to his entire class. The trenchant Da Costa breaks into a rare soft smile as he bends down and hands a tall stack of book prizes that the boy struggles to carry down from the stage, amidst booming applause from awestruck parents and students.

This was an annual ritual at his high school. One other thing was equally predictable—he never took home the language award for Hindi. Thanks to this celestial justice, one other classmate would lumber up the steps right after him, receive the second-language award, and hasten forward to assist him with his burden. More remarkable was that even at that age, he was magnanimous enough to give away his notes to his classmates the day before the exam. That early brilliance and selflessness was a precursor of his life.

In the fifties and sixties, following the turbulent independence movement that had partitioned India in 1947, the nascent nation established the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) as institutes of national importance, modeled after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The most significant academic achievement for an Indian high school student was—and still is—to secure admission into one of these institutions that admit about two percent of their applicants and rank them. He managed to place All-India one at the precocious age of sixteen, commencing a remarkable journey that would take him through Stanford and Silicon Valley.

His encyclopedic mind made him a natural quizzer, and he traveled the country for inter-collegiate competitions. He conducted several himself and followed the tradition of always setting the first question whose hint pointed back to the quiz master. In one year, this was, What is the national airline of Yugoslavia? (it was JAT Airways; the clue, his initials).

At Stanford, he worked with Professor Thomas M. Cover, the pioneering thinker in the field of Information Theory, a mathematical field that underpins many others and studies the storage, transmission, and processing of information. This relationship had started earlier through handwritten letters between professor and prospective student that turned into admission and fellowship into the Ph.D. program at Stanford. In later years, the professor would reveal that he viewed their early communication as reminiscent of that between Professor G. H. Hardy of Cambridge University and the Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan, back in the early 20 century.

In only his third year of graduate studies, Professor Cover would later approach his young student with the unique proposition of co-authoring a book on the field. 'Elements of Information Theory' was the result of their two-year collaboration and remains the seminal textbook in the field and essential reading for the mathematical underpinnings of communications and information theory that serve as building blocks for cryptography, speech communications, and data science.

From Stanford, he went east to work at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center for almost a decade before coming back to his roots at Silicon Valley, where he co-founded a couple of companies in related fields. He spent his final years as a data scientist at Google through the acquisition of a company where he was chief scientist focusing on problems of organizing and retrieving information across extensive data sets—a problem common to industries as diverse as online merchants, ride-sharing, airlines, and hospitality.

He was an expansive cook and did all of the shopping, cooking, and hosting himself. His home in Cupertino, California, was a place to lose yourself in dinner conversations while devouring North Indian staples like tandoori chicken and specialties like appam-stew from his home state of Kerala. You might be speaking with a technologist, an art enthusiast, or a healthcare professional, depending on the occasion that might have been a party, an art exhibition, or a fundraiser that he had generously hosted for a friend. The weeks before every Christmas, he went into overdrive. Firing up both his ovens, he would start up a marathon session and bake plum and fruit cakes for the best part of two days. More than two hundred would be sharply cut, packaged, and shipped—each with a personal message—to friends and erstwhile colleagues across the nation.

Despite his towering academic and professional achievements, his friends and peers remember him most for his humanity and humility. He connected people. One friend met her future husband at a party at his house. Decades later, he would meet her mother and jokingly ask for a matchmaking fee. Another recalled the periodic class hikes that he organized from his home into the nearby preserves in the Santa Cruz mountains. An undergraduate friend recalled how he would take a bus across town to the Chennai railway station every semester and wait in the long, tedious lines of pre-online India to book homebound tickets for his friends, who were nervously studying for the final exams that he didn't need to sweat. Another placed him as the moral compass of his class.

He was a devoted family man. He supported his working wife by cooking while listening to classical music or his favorite band, the Beatles. He tirelessly flew with his son and daughter around the country for their competitive squash tournaments and drove them to their music lessons. He will sadly miss out on his daughter's piano recital at Carnegie Hall next March. The family traveled widely and managed to step on every continent, including a torrid trip to Antarctica.

The end was unexpected. Hospitalization for an arterial problem led to a severe cardiac arrest from which he would not recover. Lennon's 'When I'm Sixty-four' wafted through the church at his funeral. He sadly missed that mark by seven years.