Aiyalam Parameswaran Balachandran (born 25 January 1938) is an Indian theoretical physicist known for his extensive contributions to the role of classical topology in quantum physics.

His father, Aiyalam Sundaram Parameswaran, was a chartered accountant in Pierce Leslie and Company in Cochin.

Balachandran received his PhD degree under Professor Alladi Ramakrishnan at the University of Madras.

[5] Then he joined Theoretisch Physics, University at Wien as a postdoctoral fellow under Professor Walter Thirring, subsequently at the Enrico Fermi Institute as a postdoc.

Balachandran's key scientific works to date include the revival of the Skyrme model which successfully describes baryons as topological solitons of meson fields and mathematical concepts such as homotopy groups and fibre bundles to problems in quantum physics.