famous indian scientists

Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao was born to CD Naidu and A Laxmikantamma on 10 September 1920 in Huvvina Hadagalli in present day Karnataka He was the eighth in a family of 10 children After his fathers retirement, the family settled down in Vishakapatnam in Andhra Pradesh From his earliest years, Rao had an interest in mathematics After completing high school he joined the Mrs AVN College at Vishakapatnam for the Intermediate course He received his MA in Mathematics with first rank in 1940 Rao decided to pursue a research career in mathematics, but was denied a scholarship on the grounds of late submission of the application He then went to Kolkata for an interview for a job He did not get the job, but by chance he visited the Indian Statistical Institute, then located in a couple of rooms in the Physics Department of the Presidency College, Kolkata He applied for a oneyear training course at the Institute and was admitted to the Training Section of the Institute from 1 January 1941 In July 1941 he joined the MA Statistics program of the Calcutta University By the time he passed the MA exam in 1943, winning the gold medal of the University, he had already published some research papers! In 1943 he joined ISI as a technical apprentice, doing research, teaching in the Training Section of the Institute and at Calcutta University and assisting Professor Mahalanobis in editing Sankhya the Indian Journal of Statistics
In 1946 he was deputed to the Cambridge University on a project While working full time on this, he also worked in the genetic laboratory of RA Fisher, the father of modern statistics and completed his PhD under Fisher By this time Rao had already completed some of the work which carries his name: CramerRao inequality, RaoBlackwell theorem, Raos score test and Raos orthogonal arrays He returned to ISI in 1948 and in 1949 was made a Professor at the very young age of 29 He headed and developed the Research and Training Section of the ISI, and went on to become Director of the ISI He became the associate editor of the Sankhya in 1964 and became the editor in 1972 He left ISI in 1978 and joined the University of Pittsburgh In 1988 he moved to the Pennsylvannia State University holding the Eberly Family Chair in Statistics and the Directorship of the Centre for Multivariate Analysis till 2001
Dr Rao is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2001 The CR Rao Award for Statistics was instituted in his honor, to be given once in two years In 2002 he was awarded the National Medal of Science of the USA The Advanced Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science in the Osmania University Campus has been named after him

Komaravolu Chandrasekharan was born on 21 November 1920 in Machilipatnam in modernday Andhra Pradesh He attended District Board School in Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh, and then High School at Bapatla, also in Guntur He then obtained his MA in Mathematics from the Presidency College, Chennai and was a Research Scholar in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Madras during 19401943 During 194346 he was a parttime Lecturer at Presidency College and obtained his PhD during this time under Ananda Rau, who was with Ramanujan in Cambridge Chandrasekharan then went to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA
In 1949, while he was in Princeton, he was invited by Homi Bhabha to join the School of Mathematics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research An extraordinarily gifted organiser and administrator of science, he transformed the fledgling School of Mathematics of TIFR into a centre of excellence respected the world over He initiated a very successful programme of recruitment and training of Research Scholars at TIFR The programme continues to this day along the same lines that he set down He put to excellent use his contacts with the leading mathematicians of the world, persuading many of them (like L Schwartz, a Fields medalist, and CL Siegel) to visit TIFR and deliver courses of lectures over periods of two months and more The lecture notes prepared out of these lectures and published by TIFR enjoy a great reputation in the world mathematics community to this day During 195561, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) He served as the Secretary of IMU during 196166 and as President during 197174 His initiatives over a long period of 24 years on this Committee were numerous and valued greatly He served as the Vice President of the International Council of Scientific Unions during 196366 and as its Secretary General during 196670 He was a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Cabinet, Government of India during 196166 He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1959, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in 1963 and the Ramanujan Medal in 1966 He was responsible for the IMU sponsoring the International Mathematical Colloquium held every 4 years at the Tata Institute starting 1956 In 1957 on his initiative, TIFR published the Notebooks of Srinivasa Ramanujan In the fifties, Chandrasekharan held the editorship of the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society Thanks to his abilities at persuading some of the great names in the field to publish there, several great papers appeared in the journal during this period
In 1965 he left TIFR and moved to Eidgerossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich He worked in the fields of number theory and summability His mathematical achievements are first rate, but his contribution to Indian mathematics has been even greater

Har Gobind Khorana was born in Raipur, Punjab, (now in Pakistan) on 9 January 1922 His father was a patwari, a village agricultural taxation clerk in the BritishIndian system of government Har Gobind did his schooling from the DAV High School in Multan He received his BSc and MSc degrees from the Punjab University in Lahore Khorana lived in India until 1945, when the award of a Government of India Fellowship made it possible for him to go to England and he studied for a Ph D degree at the University of Liverpool
Khorana spent a postdoctoral year (19481949) at the Eidgen

G N Ramachandran was born on 8 October 1922 in Ernakulam, Kerala His father G Narayana Iyer was the principal of Maharajas college in Ernakulam Ramachandran did his intermediate from Maharajas college and his BSc (Hons) in Physics from St Josephs College, Tiruchi In 1942 he joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore as a student in the Electrical Engineering department However, under the influence of CV Raman, he shifted to Physics He obtained his MSc and then his PhD in 1947, under Ramans supervision He then went to the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge and obtained his second PhD degree under Prof Wooster He returned to India in 1949 and joined IISc as an Assistant Professor In 1952, at the young age of 30, he moved to Madras as the Head of the Physics Department at the University of Madras On the suggestion of JD Bernal, the crystallographer and chemist, who visited the University in 1952, he started work on determining the structure of the protein collagen, the fibrous protein found in skin, bone and tendon Based on the limited data available at the time, in 1954, he proposed, along with Gopinath Kartha, the triplehelix structure for collagen, later revised in the light of new data to the coiled coil structure for biomolecules This was a fundamental advance in the understanding of biomolecular structures He and his colleagues C Ramakrishnan and V Sasisekharan went on to develop methods to examine and assess structures of biomolecules, in particular peptides In 1963, this resulted in the famous Ramachandran map, which is an indispensable tool in the study of molecular structures today His contributions in the field of Xray crystallography such as anomalous dispersion, new kinds of Fourier syntheses, and Xray intensity statistics are also extremely important His 1971 paper with AV Lakshminarayanan on threedimensional image reconstruction was to have important applications in Computer Assisted Tomography (The 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to AM Cormack and Sir GN Hounsfield for their work in CAT)
In 1971 Ramachandran returned to Bangalore to set up the Molecular Biophysics Unit at the IISc which is today a major research centre He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1977 and was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award In 1999, The International Union of Crystallography awarded him the prestigious Ewald Prize, which is given only once in three years He was the editor of Current Science between 1950 and 1957

Harish Chandra was born on 11 October 1923 in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh He attended school in Kanpur and then the University of Allahabad, where he studied theoretical physics After obtaining his masters degree in 1943 he joined the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore to work further with Homi Bhabha on theoretical physics Dr Bhabha arranged for Harish Chandra to go to Cambridge to work for his PhD under the legendary Paul Dirac In 1947 Dirac visited Princeton for one year and Harish Chandra worked as his assistant during this time In Princeton he met and was greatly influenced by the great French mathematician Chevalley, giving up physics altogether and taking up mathematics Harish moved to Columbia University after his year at Princeton In 1963, Harish Chandra was invited to become a permanent member of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton He was appointed IBMvon Neumann Professor in 1968
Harish Chandra received many awards in his career He was a Fellow of both the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy In 1974, he received the Ramanujan Medal from Indian National Science Academy He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and also won the Cole prize from the American Mathematical Society in 1954 for his papers on representations of semisimple Lie algebras and groups Harish Chandra is quoted as saying that he believed that his lack of background in mathematics was in a way responsible for the novelty of his work:I have often pondered over the roles of knowledge or experience, on the one hand, and imagination or intuition, on the other, in the process of discovery I believe that there is a certain fundamental conflict between the two, and knowledge, by advocating caution, tends to inhibit the flight of imagination Therefore, a certain naivete, unburdened by conventional wisdom, can sometimes be a positive asset His profound contributions to the representation theory of Lie groups, harmonic analysis, and related areas left researchers a rich legacy that continues today

Manali Kallat Vainu Bappu was born on August 10, 1927 to a senior astronomer in the Nizamiah Observatory, Hyderabad A brilliant student throughout, Vainu Bappu not only excelled in studies but took active part in debates, sports and other extra curricular activities However, astronomy to which he was exposed from an early age, became his passion Being a keen amateur astronomer, even as an undergraduate, he had published papers on variable star observations After obtaining his Masters degree in Physics from Madras University, Vainu Bappu joined the prestigious Harvard University on a scholarship
Within a few months of his arrival at Harvard, Vainu Bappu discovered a comet This comet was named BappuBokNewkirk, after Bappu and his colleagues Bart Bok and Gordon Newkirk who worked out the details of this comet He completed his PhD in 1952 and joined the Palomar observatory on the prestigious Carnegie Fellowship There, he and Colin Wilson discovered a relationship between the luminosity of particular kinds of stars and some of their spectral characteristics This important observation came to be known as the BappuWilson effect and is used to determine the luminosity and distance of these kind of stars
He returned to India in 1953 and largely through his efforts, he set up the Uttar Pradesh State Observatory in Nainital In 1960 he left Nainital to take over as the Director of the Kodaikanal Observatory He modernised the facilities there and it is today an active centre of astronomical research He however realised that the Kodaikanal Observatory was inadequate for making stellar observations and started searching for a good site for a stellar observatory As a result of his efforts, a totally indigenous 23 meter telescope was designed, fabricated and installed in Kavalur, Tamil Nadu Both the telescope and the observatory were named after him when it was commissioned in 1986
He was awarded the Donhoe CometMedal (1949) by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, elected as Honorary Foreign Fellow of the Belgium Academy of Sciences and was an Honorary Member of the American Astronomical Society He was elected President of the International Astronomical Union in 1979

Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan was born in Kumbakonam district of Tamil Nadu in 7 August 1925 in a welltodo family He earned his Bachelors degree in Zoology in Maharajas College in Trivandrum, Kerala and later went on to again earn a Bachelors degree in Agricultural Sciences from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University He described that his motivation for choosing his career path in agricultural sciences was the Bengal famine of 1943 He then took up a career in plant genetics mainly focussing on plants that served as source of food for humans He is known as the Father of Green Revolution in India for his leadership and success in introducing high yield varieties of wheat and rice in India He was the first recipient of World Food Prize in 1987 He has worked worldwide in collaboration with students and colleagues on a range of subjects pertaining to plant breeding, agricultural research and development and conservation of natural resources He has been honored by Government of India with Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan for his contributions He is currently the chairman of the National Commission on Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Security of India

APJ Abdul Kalam was born in a poor Tamil Muslim family in the Rameshwaram district of Tamil Nadu on 15 October 1931 Right from his childhood, he was an average student, but teachers described him as a hardworking and a bright student with exceptional love for mathematics and science He graduated in physics from Saint Josephs College, Tiruchirappalli in 1954 and later graduated from Madras Institute of Technology in Aerospace Engineering in 1960 It was a time when Aerospace Engineering in India was in its nascent stages He joined Aeronautical Development Establishment of DRDO and started his career designing small helicopter for Indian Army In 1969, he was transferred to ISRO and made the project director of Indias first satellite launch vehicle SLV, which later successfully deployed Rohini satellite in 1979 In the 1970s, he was also involved in two other important projects to develop indigenous ballistic missiles on the technology used to launch SLV vehicle He played a vital role in developing most of Indias current missiles under the Integrated Guided Missile Development Program including the most famed Agni range of missiles He also served as 11th President of India from 25 July 2002 to 25 July 2007

?ryabha?a was an Indian mathematician and astronomer, and the author of the MahaSiddhanta The numeral II is given to him to distinguish him from the earlier and more influential ?ryabha?aAryabhata IIs most eminent work was Mahasiddhanta The treatise consists of eighteen chapters and was written in the form of verse in Sanskrit The initial twelve chapters deals with topics related to mathematical astronomy and covers the topics that Indian mathematicians of that period had already worked on The various topics that have been included in these twelve chapters are: the longitudes of the planets, lunar and solar eclipses, the estimation of eclipses, the lunar crescent, the rising and setting of the planets, association of the planets with each other and with the stars
The next six chapters of the book includes topics such as geometry, geography and algebra, which were applied to calculate the longitudes of the planets In about twenty verses in the treatise, he gives elaborate rules to solve the indeterminate equation: by = ax + c These rules have been applied to a number of different cases such as when c has a positive value, when c has a negative value, when the number of the quotients is an even number, when this number of quotients is an odd number, etc

Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri (14 September 1923 ? 18 June 2005) was a leading Indian physicist, renowned for his research in general relativity and cosmology. His most significant contribution is the eponymous Raychaudhuri's equation, which demonstrates that singularities arise inevitably in general relativity and is a key ingredient in the proofs of the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems. Raychaudhuri was also revered as a teacher during his tenure at Presidency College, Kolkata. Many of his students have gone on to become established scientists.Raychaudhuri was born to Surabala and Sureshchandra Raychaudhuri on September 14, 1923 in Barisal of undivided Bengal in British India, which is now a part of Bangladesh. His father taught mathematics at a school in Kolkata. His father's cousin, Professor Hemchandra Raychaudhuri was a renowned historian and the Carmichael Professor of History at the University of Calcutta.
Raychaudhuri received his early schooling at Tirthapati Institution in Kolkata and went on to complete matriculation from Hindu School. He demonstrated an aptitude for mathematics at an early age. He graduated from Presidency College in 1942 and completed his M.Sc. at Calcutta University in 1944.
After earning his master's degree, Raychaudhuri spent four years doing experimental work.During this time, working in complete isolation, he taught himself differential geometry and the theory of general relativity. In 1952 he took a research job with the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), but to his frustration was required to work on the properties of metals rather than general relativity, which was not yet considered to be truly part of the mainstream of physics. Despite these adverse pressures, he was able to derive and publish the equation which is now named for him a few years later.Some years later, having learned that his 1955 paper was highly regarded by notable physicists, such as Pascual Jordan, Raychaudhuri was sufficiently emboldened to submit a doctoral dissertation, and received his degree in 1959.In 1961, Raychaudhuri joined the faculty of his alma mater, Presidency College in Calcutta. Ironically, his work was not widely recognized in India until the nineteen seventies, when he became a well known scientific hero. Shortly before his death, a documentary film on his career was completed.