#1.Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937):
J a g a d i s h C h a n d r a B o s e w a s b o r n o n 3 0 N o v e m b e r 1 8 5 8 , i n Myemsingh, Faridpur, a part of the Dhaka District now in Bangladesh. He attended the village school till he was 11. He then moved to Kolkata where he enrolled in St. Xavier’s. He was very much interested in Biology. However, Father Lafont, a famous Professor of Physics, inspired in Bose a great interest in Physics. Having obtained his B.A. in physical sciences, twenty two year old Bose left for London, to obtain a medical degree. However, he kept falling ill and had to discontinue his plans to be a doctor. He then obtained his B.A. degree from Christ College, Cambridge.He returned to India in 1885 and joined Presidency College, Kolkata as an Assistant Professor of Physics, where he remained till 1915. There was a peculiar practice in the college at that time. The Indian teachers in the college were paid one third of what the British eachers were paid! So Bose refused his salary but worked for three years. The fourth year he was paid in full! He was an excellent teacher, extensively using scientific demonstrations in class. Some of his students, such as S. N. Bose went on to become famous physicists themselves.During this
iod, Bose also started doing original scientific work in the a r e a of mi c rowave s , c a r rying out expe r iment s involving r e f r a c t ion, diffraction and polarization. He developed the use of galena crystals for making receivers, both for short wavelength radio waves and for white and ultraviolet light. In 1895, two years before Marconi’s demonstration, Bose demonstrated wireless communication using radio waves, using them to ring a bell remotely and to explode some gunpowder. Many of the microwave components familiar today - waveguides, horn antennas, polarizers, dielectric lenses and prisms, and even semiconductor detectors of electromagnetic radiation - were invented and used by Bose in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He also suggested the existence of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun, which was confirmed in 1944.
Bose then turned his attention to response phenomena in plants. He showed that not only animal but vegetable tissues, produce similar electric response under different kinds of stimuli – mechanical, thermal, electrical and chemical.Bose was knighted in 1917 and soon thereafter elected Fellow of the Royal Society, London, (both as physicist and biologist!). Bose had worked
all along without the right kind of scientific instruments and laboratory. For a long time he had been thinking of building a laboratory. The result was the establishment of the Bose Research Institute in Kolkata. It continues to be a famous centre of research in basic sciences.
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 In 1888, Prafulla Chandra made his journey home to India. Initially he spent a year working with his famous friend Jagadish Chandra Bose in his laboratory. In 1889, Prafulla Chandra was appointed an Assistant Professor of Chemistry in the Presidency College, Kolkata. His publications on mercurous nitrite and its derivatives brought him recognition from all over the world. Equally important was his role as a teacher - he inspired a generation of young chemists in India thereby building up an Indian school of chemistry. Famous Indian scientists like Meghnad Saha and Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar were among his students. Prafull Chandra believed that the progress of India could be achieved only by industrialization. He set up the first chemical factory in India, with very minimal resources, working from his home. In 1901, this pioneering effort resulted in the formation of the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works Ltd. He retired from the Presidency College in 1916, and was appointed as Professor of Chemistry at the University Science College. In 1921 when Prafulla Chandra reached 60 years, he donated, in advance, all his salary for the rest of his service in the University to the development of the Department of Chemistry and to the creation of two research fellowships. The value of this endowment was about two lakh rupees. He eventually retired at the age of 75. In Prafulla Chandra Ray, the qualities of both a scientist and an industrial entrepreneur were combined and he can be thought of as the father of the Indian Pharmaceutical industry. |
 In 1905 he appeared for the First Arts examination which would have allowed him to be admitted to the University of Madras. Again he failed in all subjects other than mathematics, a performance he repeated in 1906 and 1907 too. In the following years he worked on mathematics, with only Carr’s book as a guide, noting his results in what would become the famous Notebooks. He got married in 1909 and started looking for a job. His search took him to many influential people, among them Ramachandra Rao, one of the founding members of the Indian Mathematical Society. For a year he was supported by Ramachandra Rao who gave him Rs. 25 per month. He started posing and solving problems in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. His research paper on Bernoulli numbers, in 1911, brought him recognition and he became well known in Chennai as a mathematical genius. In 1912, with Ramachandra Rao’s help, he secured the post of clerk in the accounts section of the Madras Port Trust. He continued to pursue mathematics and in 1913 he wrote to G. H. Hardy in Cambridge, enclosing a long list of his own theorems. Hardy immediately recognized Ramanujan’s mathematical ability. On the basis of Hardy’s letters, Ramanujan was given a scholarship by the University of Madras in 1913. In 1914, Hardy arranged for him to go to Trinity College, Cambridge. Ramanujan’s work with Hardy produced important results right from the beginning. In 1916 Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science by Research. In 1918, he was elected a Fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, all in the same year! However, from 1917 onwards he was seriously ill and mostly bedridden. In 1919 he returned to India, in very poor health. Ramanuj an made out s t anding cont r ibut ions to ana lyt i c a l number theory, elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. His published and unpublished works have kept some of the best mathematical brains in the world busy to this day. |
#4.Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Rama (1888-1970) : Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu on 7 November 1888. His father was a lecturer in mathematics and p h y s i c s s o f r om t h e v e r y b e g i n n i n g h e wa s imme r s e d i n a n a c a d emi c atmosphere. Raman’s academic brilliance was established at a very young age. He finished his secondary school education at the tender age of thirteen
and entered the Mrs. A.V.N. College at Vishakapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. Two years later he moved to the prestigious Presidency College in Chennai.When he was fifteen, he topped his class to receive his B.A. degree with honours in Physics and English. Raman continued his studies at the Presidency College and when he was barely eighteen, graduated at the top of his class and received his M.A. degree with honours. Raman joined the Indian Audit and Accounts Service and was appointed the Assistant Accountant General in the Finance Department in Kolkata. In Kolkata, he sustained his interest in science by working in the laboratory of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, in his spare time studying the physics of stringed instruments and Indian drums. In 1917, Raman gave up hi s gove rnment job to be come the Sir Taraknath Palit Professor of Physics at the Science College of University of Calcutta (1917-33). He made enormous contributions to research in the areas o f v i b r a t i o n , s o u n d , m u s i c a l i n s t r u m e n t s , u l t r a s o n i c s , d i f f r a c t i o n ,photoelectricity, colloidal particles, X-ray diffraction, magnetron, dielectrics, etc. In particular, his work on the scattering of light during this period brought him world-wide recognition.
In 1924 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and a year later was honoured with the prestigious Hughes medal from the Royal Society. Four years later, at the joint meeting of the South Indian Science Association and the Science Club of Central College, Bangalore, he announced his discovery of what is now known as the Raman Effect. He was knighted in 1929, and in 1930, became the first Asian scientist to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discoveries relating to the scattering of light (the Raman Effect). In 1934, he became the Director of the newly established Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, where he remained
till his retirement. After retirement, he established the Raman Research Institute at Bangalore, where he served as the Director. The Government of India conferred upon him its highest award,the Bharat Ratna in 1954.
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#5.Meghnad Saha(1893-1956): Meghnad Saha was born on 6 October 1893 in Sheoratali village near Dhaka in present day Bangladesh. His father Jagannath Saha was a grocer in the village. After primary education, he was admitted to a middle school that was seven miles away from home. He stayed with a doctor near the school and had to work in that house to pay for his boarding and lodging. Overcoming all these difficulties, he stood first in the Dhaka middle school test, thus securing a Government scholarship and joined the Dhaka Collegiate school.
in 1905.Great political unrest was prevailing in Bengal, caused by the partition of the province by the British against strong popular opinion. Meghnad Saha was among the few senior students who staged a boycott of the visit by the then Governor, Sir Bampfylde Fuller and as a consequence forfeited his scholarship and had to leave the institution. He then joined the Kisori Lal Jubilee School where he passed the entrance test of the University of Calcutta standing first among students from East Bengal. He graduated from Presidency College with mathematics as his major. He then joined the newly established Science College in Kolkata as a lecturer and pursued his research activities in physics. By 1920, Meghnad Saha had established himself as one of the leading physicists of the time. His theory of high-temperature ionization of elements and its application to stellar atmospheres, as expressed by the Saha equation, is fundamental to modern a s t rophys i c s ; subs equent deve lopment of hi s ide a s ha s l ed to inc r e a s ed knowledge of the pressure and temperature distributions of stellar atmospheres. In 1920, Saha went to Imperial College, London and later to Germany.Two years later he returned to India and joined the University of Calcutta as Khaira Professor. He then moved to the University of Allahabad and remained there till 1938, establishing the Science Academy in Allahabad (now known as the National Academy of Science). In 1927, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He returned to the University of Calcutta in 1938 where he introduced nuc l e a r phys i c s into the pos t -gr adua t e phys i c s cur r i culum. In 1947 he established the Indian Institute of Nuclear Physics (now known as the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics). Later in his life, Saha played an active role in the development of scientific institutions throughout India as well as in national economic planning involving technology. |
 #6.Satyendra Nath Bose(1894-1974): Satyendra Nath Bose was born on New Years day, 1894 in Goabagan in Kolkata. His father was an accountant in Indian Railways. Satyendra Nath popularly known as Satyen Bose, did his schooling at Hindu School, Kolkata,and then joined Presidency College. He excelled in academics throughout his education – Intermediate, B.Sc. and M.Sc. with applied mathematics. His teacher at the Presidency College was Jagadish Chandra Bose - whose other stellar pupil was Meghnad Saha. Bose took his B.Sc. examination in 1913 and his M.Sc examination in 1915. He stood first in both the examinations, the second place going to Meghnad Saha. He worked as a lecturer of physics in the Science College of the University of Calcutta (1916-21) and along with Meghnad Saha, introduced postgraduate courses in modern mathematics and physics. He derived with Saha, the Saha-Bose equation of state for a nonideal gas.
In 1921, Bose left Kolkata to become a Reader at the Dakha University. It was during this eriod that he wrote the famous paper on the statistics of photons. It was named Bose statistics after him and is now an integral part of physics. Paul Dirac, the legendary physicist, coined the term boson for particles obeying these statistics. Apart from this he did theoretical work on the general t h e o r y o f r e l a t i v i t y a n d a l s o e x p e r i m e n t a l w o r k o n c r y s t a l l o g r a p h y, fluorescence, and thermoluminescence. Bose spent about 10 months in Paris in 1924, doing research with Madame Curie and Louis de Broglie. Later he went to Berlin where he met Einstein. He returned to Dhaka in 1926 and became Professor. Shortly before Independence, Bose returned to Kolkata to become the Khaira Professor of Physics, a post he kept till 1956. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1958, and the government of India named him a National Professor and awarded him the honor of Padma Vibhushan.
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 In August 1940, Bhatnagar took over as the Director of the newly created Directorate of Scientific and Industrial Research. This organisation became the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, with Bhatnagar as its Director. Bhatnagar’s tenure saw the setting up of 12 laboratories and the total number of CSIR laboratories today stands at 40. The British Government conferred on him the Order of the British Empire and in 1941, he was made the Knight Bachelor. In 1943 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and received the Padma Vibhushan (1954) from the Government of India. Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar played a significant part along with Homi Bhabha , Pr a s ant a Chandr a Maha l anobi s , Vikr am Sa r abha i and othe r s in building of post-independence Science & Technology infrastructure and in the formulation of India’s science policies. |
 wa s P a u l Di r a c , a n d B h a b h a b e c ame f a s c i n a t e d wi t h ma t h ema t i c s a n d theoretical physics. He earned his engineering degree in 1930 and Ph.D. in 1934. In 1937, together with W. Heitler, a German physicist, Bhabha solved the riddle about cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are fast moving, extremely small particles coming from outer space. When these particles enter the earth’s atmosphere, they collide with the atoms of air and create a shower of electrons. Bhabha’s discovery of the presence of nuclear particles (which he called mesons) in these showers was used to validate instein’s theory of relativity making him world famous. When the war broke out in Europe, Bhabha was on a holiday in India. In 1940, C.V. Raman, then head of the Physics Department, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, persuaded Bhabha to join the institute as a Reader in Physics and Bhabha decided to stay back in India. In 1941, Homi Bhabha was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, London, in recognition of his contributions to the field of cosmic rays, elementary particles and quantum mechanics. Bhabha soon r e a l i z ed the ne ed for an ins t i tut e ful ly devot ed to fundamental research, and wrote to J.R.D. Tata for funding. This resulted in the establishment of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai in 1945, with Bhabha as the Director, a position he held until his death. In 1948, Homi Bhabha was appointed the Chairman of the International Atomic Energy Commission. Under his guidance, nuclear reactors like the Apsara, Cirus and Zerlina were built. He gained international recognition for his excellent work and served as the President of the first United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, which was held in Geneva in 1955. He was the President of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 1960 to 1963. A multi-faceted personality, Bhabha was immensely fond of music, painting and writing. Some of his paintings are displayed in the British Art Galleries and the TIFR art collection today is rated as one of the best collections of contemporary Indian art in the country. He is the recipient of the Adam’s Award, Padma Bhushan, an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. |
 #9.Subramaniam Chandrasekhar(1910-1995):Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, a nephew of Sir C.V. Raman, was born on 19 October 1910 in Lahore, (now in Pakistan). His father was an officer in the Department of Audits and Accounts of the Indian Government Services. Chandrasekhar received his elementary education from his parents and private tutors when he was in Lahore. In 1918 Chandra moved to Chennai where he attended the Hindu High School finishing his secondary school education with honours. He then joined the Presidency College, there taking his Bachelor of Science degree in physics with honours. His first scientific paper, Compton Scattering and the New Statistics,was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1928. On the basis of this paper he was accepted as a research student by R.H. Fowler at the University of Cambridge. On the voyage to England, he developed the theory of white dwarf stars, showing that a star of mass greater than 1.45 times the mass of the sun could not become a white dwarf. This limit is now known as the Chandrasekhar limit. He obtained his doctorate in 1933. Soon after receiving his doctorate, C h a n d r a s e k h a r wa s awa r d e d t h e P r i z e F e l l ows h i p a t Tr i n i t y C o l l e g e , Cambridge. In 1937, he accepted the position of Research Associate at the Unive r s i ty of Chi c ago. Chandr a s ekha r s t ayed a t Unive r s i ty of Chi c ago throughout his career, becoming the Morton D. Hall Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1952. In 1952 he established the Astrophysical Journal and was its editor for 19 years, transforming it from a local publication of the University of Chicago into the national journal of the American Astronomical Society. He became a US citizen in 1958. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London and in 1962 received the Society’s Royal Medal. He also received the US National Medal of Science (1966). He was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics in 1983 for his theoretical work on the physical processes of importance to the structure of stars and their evolution. Chandra was a popular teacher who guided over fifty students to their Ph.D.s including some who went on to win the Nobel prize themselves!! His research explored nearly all branches of theoretical astrophysics and he published ten books, each covering a different topic, including one on the relationship between art and science. |
 The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) launched in 1975-76, brought education to five million people in 2,400 Indian villages. In 1965,he established the Community Science Centre in Ahmedabad with a view to popularise science among children. His deep cultural interests led him, along with his wife Mrinalini Sarabhai, to establish Darpana Academy, an institution devoted to performing arts and propagation of ancient culture of India.He was the recipient of the Bhatnagar Memorial Award for Physics in 1962, the Padma Bhushan in 1966, and was posthumously awarded the Padma Vibhushan. He was the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1966, Vice-President and Chairman of the UN Conference on peaceful uses of outer space in 1968, and President of the 14th General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The International Astronomical Union named a crater in the moon (in the Sea of Serenity) after him, in honour of his contributions to science. |
Indian Scientist the pride of INDIA.....
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