Famous Personalities

Jagdish Chandra Bose - 30 Nov 1858 - Bengal

M. Visvesvaraya - 15 Sep 1861 - MYSORE

SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN - 22 DEC 1887 - MYSORE

CV RAMAN - 07 NOV 1888 - MADRAS

Homi Jehangir Bhabha - 30 October 1909 - BOMBAY

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar - 19 Oct 1910 - Punjab 

Vikram Sarabhai - 12 August 1919 - Ahmedabad

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose; 30 November 1858 – 23 November 1937)[6] was a biologist, physicist, botanist and an early writer of science fiction.[7] He pioneered the investigation of radio microwave optics, made significant contributions to botany, and was a major force behind the expansion of experimental science on the Indian subcontinent.[8] He has been named one of the fathers of radio science.[9] Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction. He invented the crescograph, a device for measuring the growth of plants. A crater on the moon was named in his honour.[10] He founded Bose Institute, a premier research institute in India and also one of its oldest. Established in 1917, the institute was the first interdisciplinary research centre in Asia.[11] He served as the Director of Bose Institute from its inception until his death.

Born in Munshiganj, Bengal Presidency, during British governance of India (now in Bangladesh),[6] Bose graduated from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta (now Kolkata, West Bengal, India). He attended the University of London to study medicine, but had to give it up due to health problems. Instead, he conducted research with Nobel Laureate Lord Rayleigh at the University of Cambridge. Bose returned to India to join the Presidency College of the University of Calcutta as a professor of physics. There, despite racial discrimination and a lack of funding and equipment, Bose carried on his scientific research. He made progress in his research into radio waves in the microwave spectrum and was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio waves.

Bose made pioneering discoveries in plant physiology. He used his own invention, the crescograph, to measure plant response to various stimuli and proved parallelism between animal and plant tissues. Bose filed for a patent for one of his inventions because of peer pressure, but he was generally critical of the patent system. To facilitate his research, he constructed automatic recorders capable of registering extremely slight movements; these instruments produced some striking results, such as quivering of injured plants, which Bose interpreted as a power of feeling in plants. His books include Response in the Living and Non-Living (1902) and The Nervous Mechanism of Plants (1926). He spent the last years of his life in Giridih. Here he lived in the house located near Jhanda Maidan. This building was named Jagdish Chandra Bose Smriti Vigyan Bhavan. It was inaugurated on 28 February 1997 by the then Governor of Bihar AR Kidwai.[12] In a 2004 BBC poll to name the Greatest Bengali of all time, Bose placed seventh.

Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in a Bengali Kayastha family in Munsiganj (Bikrampur), Bengal Presidency (present-day Bangladesh)[6][14] on 30 November 1858, to Bama Sundari Bose and Bhagawan Chandra Bose. His father was a leading member of the Brahmo Samaj and worked as a civil servant with the title Deputy Magistrate and Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) in several places, including Faridpur and Bardhaman.[15][16]

Bose's father sent Bose to a Bengali language school for his early education, as it was important to him that his son should study in his native language and culture before studying in English. Speaking at the Bikrampur Conference in 1915, Bose described the effect this early education had on him:

At that time, sending children to English schools was an aristocratic status symbol. In the vernacular school, to which I was sent, the son of the Muslim attendant of my father sat on my right side, and the son of a fisherman sat on my left. They were my playmates. I listened spellbound to their stories of birds, animals, and aquatic creatures. Perhaps these stories created in my mind a keen interest in investigating the workings of Nature. When I returned home from school accompanied by my school fellows, my mother welcomed and fed all of us without discrimination. Although she was an orthodox old-fashioned lady, she never considered herself guilty of impiety by treating these 'untouchables' as her own children. It was because of my childhood friendship with them that I could never feel that there were 'creatures' who might be labeled 'low-caste', I never realized that there existed a 'problem' common to the two communities, Hindus and Muslims.[16]

Bose joined the Hare School in Kolkata in 1869, followed by St. Xavier's School, also in Kolkata. In 1875, he passed the entrance examination of the University of Calcutta and was admitted to St. Xavier's College, Kolkata. There, he met Jesuit Father Eugene Lafont, who played a significant role in developing his interest in natural sciences.[16][17] He received a BA from the University of Calcutta in 1879.[15]

Bose wanted to follow his father into the Indian Civil Service, but his father forbid it, saying his son should be a scholar who would “rule nobody but himself.”[18] Bose went to England to study medicine at the University of London, but had to quit because of allergies & ill health, possibly worsened by the chemicals used in the dissection rooms.[19][self-published source][15]

Through the recommendation of Anandamohan Bose, his brother-in-law and the first Indian Wrangler at the University of Cambridge, Bose secured admission in Christ's College, Cambridge to study natural sciences. In 1884 he received a BA (Natural Sciences Tripos) from the University of Cambridge[17] as well as a BSc from the University College London affiliated under University of London in 1883.[20][21]

Among Bose's teachers at Cambridge were Lord Rayleigh, Michael Foster, James Dewar, Francis Darwin, Francis Balfour, and Sidney Vines. While at Cambridge, he met University of Edinburgh student Prafulla Chandra Roy, with whom he became intimate friends.[15][16] In 1887, Bose married feminist and social worker Abala Bose.[22]

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan FRS (/ˈsriːnɪvɑːsə rɑːˈmɑːnʊdʒən/;[1] born Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar, IPA: [sriːniʋaːsa ɾaːmaːnud͡ʑan ajːaŋgar]; 22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920)[2][3] was an Indian mathematician. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable. Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation: according to Hans Eysenck: "He tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered".[4] Seeking mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a postal correspondence with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. Recognising Ramanujan's work as extraordinary, Hardy arranged for him to travel to Cambridge. In his notes, Hardy commented that Ramanujan had produced groundbreaking new theorems, including some that "defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before",[5] and some recently proven but highly advanced results.

During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations).[6] Many were completely novel; his original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime, the Ramanujan theta function, partition formulae and mock theta functions, have opened entire new areas of work and inspired a vast amount of further research.[7] Of his thousands of results, all but a dozen or two have now been proven correct.[8] The Ramanujan Journal, a scientific journal, was established to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan,[9] and his notebooks—containing summaries of his published and unpublished results—have been analysed and studied for decades since his death as a source of new mathematical ideas. As late as 2012, researchers continued to discover that mere comments in his writings about "simple properties" and "similar outputs" for certain findings were themselves profound and subtle number theory results that remained unsuspected until nearly a century after his death.[10][11] He became one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society and only the second Indian member, and the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Of his original letters, Hardy stated that a single look was enough to show they could have been written only by a mathematician of the highest calibre, comparing Ramanujan to mathematical geniuses such as Euler and Jacobi.

In 1919, ill health—now believed to have been hepatic amoebiasis (a complication from episodes of dysentery many years previously)—compelled Ramanujan's return to India, where he died in 1920 at the age of 32. His last letters to Hardy, written in January 1920, show that he was still continuing to produce new mathematical ideas and theorems. His "lost notebook", containing discoveries from the last year of his life, caused great excitement among mathematicians when it was rediscovered in 1976.

A deeply religious Hindu,[12] Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and said his family goddess, Namagiri Thayar, revealed his mathematical knowledge to him. He once said, "An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."

Ramanujan (literally, "younger brother of Rama", a Hindu deity) was born on 22 December 1887 into a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family in Erode, in present-day Tamil Nadu.[15] His father, Kuppuswamy Srinivasa Iyengar, originally from Thanjavur district, worked as a clerk in a sari shop.[16][2] His mother, Komalatammal, was a housewife and sang at a local temple.[17] They lived in a small traditional home on Sarangapani Sannidhi Street in the town of Kumbakonam.[18] The family home is now a museum. When Ramanujan was a year and a half old, his mother gave birth to a son, Sadagopan, who died less than three months later. In December 1889, Ramanujan contracted smallpox, but recovered, unlike the 4,000 others who died in a bad year in the Thanjavur district around this time. He moved with his mother to her parents' house in Kanchipuram, near Madras (now Chennai). His mother gave birth to two more children, in 1891 and 1894, both of whom died before their first birthdays.[14]

On 1 October 1892, Ramanujan was enrolled at the local school.[19] After his maternal grandfather lost his job as a court official in Kanchipuram,[20] Ramanujan and his mother moved back to Kumbakonam, and he was enrolled in Kangayan Primary School.[21] When his paternal grandfather died, he was sent back to his maternal grandparents, then living in Madras. He did not like school in Madras, and tried to avoid attending. His family enlisted a local constable to make sure he attended school. Within six months, Ramanujan was back in Kumbakonam.[21]

Since Ramanujan's father was at work most of the day, his mother took care of the boy, and they had a close relationship. From her, he learned about tradition and puranas, to sing religious songs, to attend pujas at the temple, and to maintain particular eating habits—all part of Brahmin culture.[22] At Kangayan Primary School, Ramanujan performed well. Just before turning 10, in November 1897, he passed his primary examinations in English, Tamil, geography, and arithmetic with the best scores in the district.[23] That year, Ramanujan entered Town Higher Secondary School, where he encountered formal mathematics for the first time.[23]

A child prodigy by age 11, he had exhausted the mathematical knowledge of two college students who were lodgers at his home. He was later lent a book written by S. L. Loney on advanced trigonometry.[24][25] He mastered this by the age of 13 while discovering sophisticated theorems on his own. By 14, he received merit certificates and academic awards that continued throughout his school career, and he assisted the school in the logistics of assigning its 1,200 students (each with differing needs) to its approximately 35 teachers.[26] He completed mathematical exams in half the allotted time, and showed a familiarity with geometry and infinite series. Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic equations in 1902. He would later develop his own method to solve the quartic. In 1903, he tried to solve the quintic, not knowing that it was impossible to solve with radicals.[27]

In 1903, when he was 16, Ramanujan obtained from a friend a library copy of A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, G. S. Carr's collection of 5,000 theorems.[28][29] Ramanujan reportedly studied the contents of the book in detail.[30] The next year, Ramanujan independently developed and investigated the Bernoulli numbers and calculated the Euler–Mascheroni constant up to 15 decimal places.[31] His peers at the time said they "rarely understood him" and "stood in respectful awe" of him.[26]

When he graduated from Town Higher Secondary School in 1904, Ramanujan was awarded the K. Ranganatha Rao prize for mathematics by the school's headmaster, Krishnaswami Iyer. Iyer introduced Ramanujan as an outstanding student who deserved scores higher than the maximum.[32] He received a scholarship to study at Government Arts College, Kumbakonam,[33][34] but was so intent on mathematics that he could not focus on any other subjects and failed most of them, losing his scholarship in the process.[35] In August 1905, Ramanujan ran away from home, heading towards Visakhapatnam, and stayed in Rajahmundry[36] for about a month.[35] He later enrolled at Pachaiyappa's College in Madras. There, he passed in mathematics, choosing only to attempt questions that appealed to him and leaving the rest unanswered, but performed poorly in other subjects, such as English, physiology, and Sanskrit.[37] Ramanujan failed his Fellow of Arts exam in December 1906 and again a year later. Without an FA degree, he left college and continued to pursue independent research in mathematics, living in extreme poverty and often on the brink of starvation.[38]

In 1910, after a meeting between the 23-year-old Ramanujan and the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, Ramanujan began to get recognition in Madras's mathematical circles, leading to his inclusion as a researcher at the University of Madras.[39]

On 14 July 1909, Ramanujan married Janaki (Janakiammal; 21 March 1899 – 13 April 1994),[40] a girl his mother had selected for him a year earlier and who was ten years old when they married.[41][42][43] It was not unusual then for marriages to be arranged with girls at a young age. Janaki was from Rajendram, a village close to Marudur (Karur district) Railway Station. Ramanujan's father did not participate in the marriage ceremony.[44] As was common at that time, Janaki continued to stay at her maternal home for three years after marriage, until she reached puberty. In 1912, she and Ramanujan's mother joined Ramanujan in Madras.[45]

After the marriage, Ramanujan developed a hydrocele testis.[46] The condition could be treated with a routine surgical operation that would release the blocked fluid in the scrotal sac, but his family could not afford the operation. In January 1910, a doctor volunteered to do the surgery at no cost.[47]

After his successful surgery, Ramanujan searched for a job. He stayed at a friend's house while he went from door to door around Madras looking for a clerical position. To make money, he tutored students at Presidency College who were preparing for their Fellow of Arts exam.[48]

In late 1910, Ramanujan was sick again. He feared for his health, and told his friend R. Radakrishna Iyer to "hand [his notebooks] over to Professor Singaravelu Mudaliar [the mathematics professor at Pachaiyappa's College] or to the British professor Edward B. Ross, of the Madras Christian College."[49] After Ramanujan recovered and retrieved his notebooks from Iyer, he took a train from Kumbakonam to Villupuram, a city under French control.[50][51] In 1912, Ramanujan moved with his wife and mother to a house in Saiva Muthaiah Mudali street, George Town, Madras, where they lived for a few months.[52] In May 1913, upon securing a research position at Madras University, Ramanujan moved with his family to Triplicane.[53]

Pursuit of career in mathematics

In 1910, Ramanujan met deputy collector V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, who founded the Indian Mathematical Society.[54] Wishing for a job at the revenue department where Aiyer worked, Ramanujan showed him his mathematics notebooks. As Aiyer later recalled:

I was struck by the extraordinary mathematical results contained in [the notebooks]. I had no mind to smother his genius by an appointment in the lowest rungs of the revenue department.[55]

Aiyer sent Ramanujan, with letters of introduction, to his mathematician friends in Madras.[54] Some of them looked at his work and gave him letters of introduction to R. Ramachandra Rao, the district collector for Nellore and the secretary of the Indian Mathematical Society.[56][57][58] Rao was impressed by Ramanujan's research but doubted that it was his own work. Ramanujan mentioned a correspondence he had with Professor Saldhana, a notable Bombay mathematician, in which Saldhana expressed a lack of understanding of his work but concluded that he was not a fraud.[59] Ramanujan's friend C. V. Rajagopalachari tried to quell Rao's doubts about Ramanujan's academic integrity. Rao agreed to give him another chance, and listened as Ramanujan discussed elliptic integrals, hypergeometric series, and his theory of divergent series, which Rao said ultimately convinced him of Ramanujan's brilliance.[59] When Rao asked him what he wanted, Ramanujan replied that he needed work and financial support. Rao consented and sent him to Madras. He continued his research with Rao's financial aid. With Aiyer's help, Ramanujan had his work published in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.[60]

One of the first problems he posed in the journal[32] was to find the value of:

C V Raman 

Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman FRS (/ˈrɑːmən/;[1] 7 November 1888 – 21 November 1970) was an Indian physicist known for his work in the field of light scattering.[2] 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.[3]

Born to Tamil Brahmin parents, Raman was a precocious child, completing his secondary and higher secondary education from St Aloysius' Anglo-Indian High School at the ages of 11 and 13, respectively. He topped the bachelor's degree examination of the University of Madras with honours in physics from Presidency College at age 16. His first research paper, on diffraction of light, was published in 1906 while he was still a graduate student. The next year he obtained a master's degree. He joined the Indian Finance Service in Calcutta as Assistant Accountant General at age 19. There he became acquainted with the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), the first research institute in India, which allowed him to carry out independent research and where he made his major contributions in acoustics and optics.

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 colour of the sea at the time, namely the reflected Rayleigh-scattered 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 the same year. He established the Raman Research Institute in 1948 where he worked to his last days.

The Raman effect was discovered on 28 February 1928. The day is celebrated annually by the Government of India as the National Science Day. In 1954, the Government of India honoured him with the first Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian award. He later smashed the medallion in protest against Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's policies on scientific research.

Vikram Sarabhai 

Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai (12 August 1919 – 30 December 1971) was an Indian physicist and astronomer who initiated space research and helped develop nuclear power in India. He was honoured with Padma Bhushan in 1966 and the Padma Vibhushan (posthumously) in 1972. He is internationally regarded as the Father of the Indian Space Program.

Son of Ambalal Sarabhai, he came from the famous Sarabhai family from India who were major industrialists committed to the Indian independence movement. Vikram Sarabhai married the classical dancer Mrinalini in 1942. The couple had two children. His daughter Mallika gained prominence as an actress and activist, and his son Kartikeya too became an active person in science. During his lifetime, he practiced Jainism.[6] He attended Gujarat College, Ahmedabad, but later moved to the University of Cambridge, England, where he took his tripos in natural sciences in 1940.[7] In 1945 he returned to Cambridge to pursue PhD and wrote a thesis, “Cosmic Ray Investigations in Tropical Latitudes,” in 1947

Known as the cradle of space sciences in India, the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) was founded in 1947 by Vikram Sarabhai.[8] PRL had a modest beginning at his residence, the "RETREAT", with research on cosmic rays. The institute was formally established at the M.G. Science Institute, Ahmedabad, on 11 November 1947[9] with support from the Karmkshetra Educational Foundation and the Ahmedabad Education Society. Prof. Kalpathi Ramakrishna Ramanathan was the first Director of the institute. The initial focus was research on cosmic rays and the properties of the upper atmosphere. Research areas were expanded to include theoretical physics and radio physics later with grants from the Atomic Energy Commission. He led the Sarabhai family-owned business conglomerate.

His interests varied from science to sports to statistics. He set up the Operations Research Group (ORG), the first market research organization in the country. Most notable among the many institutes he helped set up are the Nehru Foundation for Development in Ahmedabad, the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), the Ahmedabad Textile Industry's Research Association (ATIRA) and the (CEPT). Along with his wife Mrinalini Sarabhai, he founded the Darpana Academy of Performing Arts. Other projects and institutions initiated or established by him include the Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) in Kalpakkam, Variable Energy Cyclotron Project in Calcutta, Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL) in Hyderabad and Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) in Jaduguda, Jharkhand. Sarabhai started a project for the fabrication and launch of an Indian satellite. As a result, the first Indian satellite, Aryabhata, was put in orbit in 1975 from a Russian cosmodrome.[8] He was the founder of Indian Space Research Organisation.

On 30 December 1971, Sarabhai was to review the SLV design before his departure for Bombay the same night. He had spoken to A. P. J. Abdul Kalam on the telephone. Within an hour of the conversation, Sarabhai died at the age of 52 due to cardiac arrest in Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram). His body was cremated in Ahmedabad.