Rudranath Capildeo was a Trinidadian and Tobagonian politician, mathematician and barrister. He was a member of the prominent Hindu Indo-Trinidadian Capildeo family. Capildeo was the leader of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) from 1960 to 1969 and the first Leader of the Opposition in the Parliament of the independent Trinidad and Tobago from 1962 to 1967. He was also a faculty member at the University of London, eventually holding the position of Reader of Mathematics. He was awarded the Trinity Cross, the nation's highest award, in 1969.

The Capildeo family is an Indo-Trinidadian and Tobagonian family of Hindu pundits, politicians, and writers. The most notable members are 2001 Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul and mathematician and politician Rudranath Capildeo. The ancestral home of the Capildeo family is known as Anand Bhavan and is in Chaguanas, Caroni County, Trinidad and Tobago. No-one today knows how the name Kapil transformed into Capildeo. It is possible that Kapil added dev, meaning God, from his village's name of Mahadeva Dubey to his name. Transliteration from Hindi to English was not well developed in the 19th century and words were spelt differently then from the way they are now. Thus, Kapil was changed to Capil and dev to deo, giving Kapil's descendants the surname of Capildeo.