Satyendra Nath Bose
Famous Indian Scientists
Satyendra Nath Bose
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.