GREATEST SCIENTISTS OF INDIA
1. C.V. RAMANSir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (7 November 1888 – 21 November
1970) was an Indian physicist known for his work in the field of light
scattering. Using a spectrograph that he developed, he and his student K.
S. Krishnan discovered that when light traverses a transparent material,
the deflected light changes its wavelength and frequency. This
phenomenon, a hitherto unknown type of scattering of light, which they
called "modified scattering" was subsequently termed the Raman effect
or Raman scattering. Raman received the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for
the discovery and was the first Asian to receive a Nobel Prize in any
branch of science. In 1917, he was appointed the first Palit Professor of
Physics by Ashutosh Mukherjee at the Rajabazar Science College under
the University of Calcutta. On his first trip to Europe, seeing the
Mediterranean Sea motivated him to identify the prevailing explanation for
the blue color of the sea at the time, namely the reflected Rayleighscattered light from the sky, as being incorrect. He founded the Indian
Journal of Physics in 1926. He moved to Bangalore in 1933 to become
the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science. He founded the
Indian Academy of Sciences.
2. A. P. J. Abdul KalamAvul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam (15 October 1931 – 27 July 2015) was an Indian
aerospace scientist who served as the 11th president of India from 2002 to 2007. He was
born and raised in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu and studied physics and aerospace
engineering. He spent the next four decades as a scientist and science administrator, mainly
at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Indian Space Research
Organisation (ISRO) and was intimately involved in India's civilian space programme and
military missile development efforts. He thus came to be known as the Missile Man of India
for his work on the development of ballistic missile and launch vehicle technology. He also
played a pivotal organisational, technical, and political role in India's Pokhran-II nuclear tests
in 1998, the first since the original nuclear test by India in 1974.
Kalam was elected as the 11th president of India in 2002 with the support of both the ruling
Bharatiya Janata Party and the then-opposition Indian National Congress. Widely referred to
as the "People's President", he returned to his civilian life of education, writing and public
service after a single term. He was a recipient of several prestigious awards, including the
Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour.
Kalam received 7 honorary doctorates from 40 universities. The Government of India
honoured him with the Padma Bhushan in 1981 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1990 for his
work with ISRO and DRDO and his role as a scientific advisor to the Government. In 1997,
Kalam received India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, for his contribution to the
scientific research and modernisation of defence technology in India. In 2013, he was the
recipient of the Von Braun Award from the National Space Society "to recognize excellence
in the management and leadership of a space-related project.
While delivering a lecture at the Indian Institute of Management Shillong, Kalam collapsed
and died from an apparent cardiac arrest on 27 July 2015, aged 83. Thousands, including
national-level dignitaries, attended the funeral ceremony held in his hometown of
Rameswaram, where he was buried with full state honours.
3.Homi J. BhabhaHomi Jehangir Bhabha, FRS (30 October 1909 – 24 January 1966) was an Indian
nuclear physicist, founding director, and professor of physics at the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research (TIFR). Colloquially known as "Father of the Indian nuclear
programme",[3] Bhabha was also the founding director of the Atomic Energy
Establishment, Trombay (AEET) which is now named the Bhabha Atomic Research
Centre in his honour. TIFR and AEET were the cornerstone of Indian development of
nuclear weapons which Bhabha also supervised as director. Homi Bhabha was
awarded the Adams Prize (1942) and Padma Bhushan (1954). He was also nominated
for the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1951 and 1953–1956.
Bhabha received his doctorate in nuclear physics after publishing his first scientific
paper, "The Absorption of Cosmic radiation". In the paper, Bhabha offered an
explanation of the absorption features and electron shower production in cosmic
rays. The paper helped him win the Isaac Newton Studentship in 1934, which he
held for the next three years. The following year, he completed his doctoral studies
in theoretical physics under Ralph H. Fowler. During his studentship, he split his time
working at Cambridge and with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. In 1935, Bhabha
published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, in which he
performed the first calculation to determine the cross section of electron-positron
scattering. Electron-positron scattering was later named Bhabha scattering, in
honour of his contributions in the field. In 1936, with Walter Heitler, he co-authored
a paper, "The Passage of Fast Electrons and the Theory of Cosmic Showers" in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, in which they used their theory to
describe how primary cosmic rays from outer space interact with the upper
atmosphere to produce particles observed at the ground level. Bhabha and Heitler
then made numerical estimates of the number of electrons in the cascade process at
different altitudes for different electron initiation energies. The calculations agreed
with the experimental observations of cosmic ray showers made by Bruno Rossi and
Pierre Victor Auger a few years before. Bhabha later concluded that observations of
the properties of such particles would lead to the straightforward experimental
verification of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. In 1937, Bhabha was awarded the
Senior Studentship of the 1851 exhibition, which helped him continue his work at
Cambridge until the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
4. Satyendra Nath BoseSatyendra Nath Bose FRS[3] (1 January 1894 – 4 February 1974) was an Indian
mathematician and physicist specializing in theoretical physics. He is best known for his
work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, in developing the foundation for Bose
statistics and the theory of the Bose condensate. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was
awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 1954 by the
Government of India. The class of particles that obey Bose statistics, bosons, was
named after Bose by Paul Dirac. A polymath, he had a wide range of interests in varied
fields, including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts,
literature, and music. He served on many research and development committees in
sovereign India.
Satyendra Nath Bose, along with Saha, presented several papers in theoretical physics
and pure mathematics from 1918 onwards. In 1924, while working as a Reader
(Professor without a chair) at the Physics Department of the University of Dhaka, Bose
wrote a paper deriving Planck's quantum radiation law without any reference to
classical physics by using a novel way of counting states with identical particles. This
paper was seminal in creating the important field of quantum statistics. Though not
accepted at once for publication, he sent the article directly to Albert Einstein in
Germany. Einstein, recognising the importance of the paper, translated it into German
himself and submitted it on Bose's behalf to the prestigious Zeitschrift für Physik. As a
result of this recognition, Bose was able to work for two years in European X-ray and
crystallography laboratories, during which he worked with Louis de Broglie, Marie
Curie, and Einstein.
In the process of describing this discrepancy, Bose for the first time took the position
that the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution would not be true for microscopic particles,
where fluctuations due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle will be significant. Thus
he stressed the probability of finding particles in the phase space, each state having
volume h3, and discarding the distinct position and momentum of the particles.
5. Prasanta Chandra MahalanobisPrasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (29 June 1893– 28 June 1972) was an Indian scientist and
statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure,
and for being one of the members of the first Planning Commission of free India. He
made pioneering studies in anthropometry in India. He founded the Indian Statistical
Institute, and contributed to the design of large-scale sample surveys.For his
contributions, Mahalanobis has been considered the father of modern statistics in India.
Many colleagues of Mahalanobis took an interest in statistics. An informal group
developed in the Statistical Laboratory, which was located in his room at the Presidency
College, Calcutta. On 17 December 1931 Mahalanobis called a meeting with Pramatha
Nath Banerji (Minto Professor of Economics), Nikhil Ranjan Sen (Khaira Professor of
Applied Mathematics) and Sir R. N. Mukherji. Together they established the Indian
Statistical Institute (ISI) in Baranagar, and formally registered on 28 April 1932 as a nonprofit distributing learned society under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860. The
institute was initially in the Physics Department of the Presidency College; its
expenditure in the first year was Rs. 238. It gradually grew with the pioneering work of a
group of his colleagues, including S. S. Bose, J. M. Sengupta, R. C. Bose, S. N. Roy, K. R.
Nair, R. R. Bahadur, Gopinath Kallianpur, D. B. Lahiri and C. R. Rao. The institute also
gained major assistance through Pitambar Pant, who was a secretary to Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru. Pant was trained in statistics at the Institute and took a keen interest
in its affairs.[1] In 1933, the Institute founded the journal Sankhya, along the lines of
Karl Pearson's Biometrika. The institute started a training section in 1938. Many of the
early workers left the ISI for careers in the United States and with the government of
India. Mahalanobis invited J. B. S. Haldane to join him at the ISI; Haldane joined as a
Research Professor from August 1957, staying until February 1961. He resigned from the
ISI due to frustrations with the administration and disagreements with Mahalanobis'
policies. He was concerned with the frequent travels and absence of the director and
complained that the "... journeyings of our Director define a novel random vector."
Haldane helped the ISI develop in biometrics