famous indian scientists

Jagadish Chandra Bose was born on 30 November 1858, inMyemsingh, 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 Xaviers 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 BA 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 BA 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 teachers 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 period, Bose also started doing original scientific work in the area of microwaves, carrying out experiments involving refraction, 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 Marconis 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

Prafulla Chandra was born on 2 August 1861 in RaruliKatipara, a village in the District of Khulna (in present day Bangladesh) His early education started in his village school He often played truant and spent his time resting comfortably on the branch of a tree, hidden under its leaves After attending the village school, he went to Kolkata, where he studied at Hare School and the Metropolitan College The lectures of Alexander Pedler in the Presidency College, which he used to attend, attracted him to chemistry, although his first love was literature He continued to take interest in literature, and taught himself Latin and French at home After obtaining a FA diploma from the University of Calcutta, he proceeded to the University of Edinburgh on a Gilchrist scholarship where he obtained both his BSc and DSc degrees 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
Prafulla 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

Ramanujan was born in Erode, a small village in Tamil Nadu on 22 December 1887 When he was a year old his family moved to the town of Kumbakonam, where his father worked as a clerk in a cloth merchants shop When he was nearly five years old, Ramanujan enrolled in the primary school In 1898 he joined the Town High School in Kumbakonam At the Town High School, Ramanujan did well in all subjects and proved himself an able all round scholar It was here that he came across the book Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics by G S Carr Influenced by the book, he began working on mathematics on his own, summing geometric and arithmetic series He was given a scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam However his scholarship was not renewed because Ramanujan neglected all subjects other than mathematics 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 Carrs 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 Raos 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 Ramanujans mathematical ability On the basis of Hardys 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
Ramanujans 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
Ramanujan made outstanding contributions to analytical 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

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu on 7 November 1888 His father was a lecturer in mathematics and physics so from the very beginning he was immersed in an academic atmosphere Ramans 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 AVN 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 BA 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 MA 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 his government job to become the Sir Taraknath Palit Professor of Physics at the Science College of University of Calcutta (191733) He made enormous contributions to research in the areas of vibration, sound, musical instruments, ultrasonics, diffraction, photoelectricity, colloidal particles, Xray diffraction, magnetron, dielectrics, etc In particular, his work on the scattering of light during this period brought him worldwide 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

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 hightemperature ionization of elements and its application to stellar atmospheres, as expressed by the Saha equation, is fundamental to modern astrophysics; subsequent development of his ideas has led to increased 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 nuclear physics into the postgraduate physics curriculum 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

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 period 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 theory of relativity and also experimental work on crystallography, 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.

Bhatnagar was born on 21 February 1894 at Bhera, in the district of Shapur in Punjab (now in Pakistan) When he was barely eight months old, his father passed away He spent his next thirteen years under the care of his maternal grandfather in Bulandshahar in Uttar Pradesh Under the influence of his grandfather, young Bhatnagar not only developed a taste for engineering and science but also became interested at a very early age in geometry and algebra and in making mechanical toys In 1911, Shanti published a letter to the editor, in The Leader, Allahabad, on how to make a substitute for carbon electrodes in a battery using molasses and carbonaceous matter under pressure and heat
Matriculating the same year, he joined the Dayal Singh College, Lahore After finishing his intermediate examination in first division, Shanti joined the Forman Christian College and after his BSc and MSc degrees, he spent the next two years at the University of London earning his DSc degree on the surface tension of oils, under the supervision of Professor FG Donnan Returning to India in 1921, he joined the Benares Hindu University as a Professor, remaining there till 1924 From 1924 to 1940 he served as the Director of the University Chemical Laboratories, Lahore, addressing problems in industrial and applied chemistry
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 Bhatnagars 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, Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Vikram Sarabhai and others in building of postindependence Science & Technology infrastructure and in the formulation of Indias science policies

Homi Bhabha was born on 30 October 1909 in Mumbai Son of a barrister, he grew up in a privileged environment In Mumbai he attended the Cathedral & John Connon School and then Elphinstone College, followed by the Royal Institute of Science After passing the Senior Cambridge Examination at the age of sixteen, he joined the Gonvile and Caius College in Cambridge with an intention to pursue mechanical engineering His mathematics tutor was Paul Dirac, and Bhabha became fascinated with mathematics and theoretical physics He earned his engineering degree in 1930 and PhD 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 earths atmosphere, they collide with the atoms of air and create a shower of electrons Bhabhas discovery of the presence of nuclear particles (which he called mesons) in these showers was used to validate Einsteins theory of relativity making him world famous
When the war broke out in Europe, Bhabha was on a holiday in India In 1940, CV 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 realized the need for an institute fully devoted to fundamental research, and wrote to JRD 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 multifaceted 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 Adams 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

Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, a nephew of Sir CV 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 RH 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 145 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, Chandrasekhar was awarded the Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge In 1937, he accepted the position of Research Associate at the University of Chicago Chandrasekhar stayed at University of Chicago 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 Societys 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 PhDs 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

Vikram Sarabhai was born on 12 August 1919 at Ahmedabad He had his early education in a private school,Retreat run by his parents on Montessori lines This atmosphere injected into the young boy the seeds of scientific curiosity, ingenuity and creativity With a natural inclination towards physics and mathematics, Vikram Sarabhai did not get into his family business After school and college in Gujarat, he went to England and obtained his tripos at St Johns College in 1939 He returned to India for a while and worked alongside Sir CV Raman in the field of cosmic rays, at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, after which he returned to Cambridge, England for further research in the area and completed his PhD in 1947 He established the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad in 1948, in a few rooms at the MG Science Institute with Professor KK Ramanathan as Director In April 1954, PRL moved into a new building and Dr Sarabhai made it the cradle of the Indian Space Programme At the young age of 28, he was asked to organise and create the ATIRA, the Ahmedabad Textile Industrys Research Association and was its Honorary Director during 194956 He also helped build and direct the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad from 19621965
Sarabhai pioneered Indias space age by expanding the Indian Space Research Organization Indias first satellite Aryabhata launched in 1975, was one of the many projects planned by him Like Bhabha, Sarabhai wanted the practical application of science to reach the common man Thus he saw a golden opportunity to harness space science to the development of the country in the fields of communication, meteorology, remote sensing and education 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, VicePresident 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