C.V. Raman is one of the most renowned scientists produced by India. His full name was Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. For his pioneering work on scattering of light, C.V. Raman won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930. During those times there were not many opportunities for scientists in India. Therefore, Raman joined the Indian Finance Department in 1907. After his office hours, he carried out his experimental research in the laboratory of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science at Calcutta. He carried out research in acoustics and optics.
In 1917, Raman was offered the position of Sir Taraknath Palit Professorship of Physics at Calcutta University. He stayed there for the next fifteen years. During his tenure there, he received world wide recognition for his work in optics and scattering of light. He was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1924 and the British made him a knight of the British Empire in 1929. In 1930, Sir C.V. Raman was awarded with Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on scattering of light. The discovery was later christened as "Raman Effect".
In 1934, C.V. Raman became the director of the newly established Indian Institute of Sciences in Bangalore, where two years later he continued as a professor of physics. Other investigations carried out by Raman were: his experimental and theoretical studies on the diffraction of light by acoustic waves of ultrasonic and hypersonic frequencies (published 1934-1942), and those on the effects produced by X-rays on infrared vibrations in crystals exposed to ordinary light. In 1947, he was appointed as the first National Professor by the new government of Independent India. He retired from the Indian Institute in 1948 and a year later he established the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, where he worked till his death.
Meghnad Saha FRS (6 October 1893 16 February 1956) was an Indian astrophysicist best known for his development of the Saha equation, used to describe chemical and physical conditions in stars.
Meghnad Saha had his early schooling in the primary school of the village. As his family could hardly able to make both ends meet, Meghnad Saha managed to pursue his schooling only due to the generosity of a local medical practitioner, Ananta Kumar Das, who provided him with boarding and lodging in his house.
In 1911, he ranked third in the ISc exam while the first position went to another great scientist Satyendranath Bose. Meghnad Saha took admission in Presidency College Calcutta. In 1913 he graduated from Presidency College with Mathematics major and got the second rank in the University of Calcutta while the first one was taken by S.N. Bose. In 1915, both S.N.Bose and Meghnad Saha ranked first in M.Sc. exam, Meghnad Saha in Applied Mathematics and S.N. Bose in Pure Mathematics.
In 1919, American Astrophysical Journal published - "On Selective Radiation Pressure and it's application" - a research paper by Meghnad Saha. He put forward an "ionization formula" which explained the presence of the spectral lines. The formula proved to be a breakthrough in astrophysics. He went abroad and stayed for two years. He spent time in research at Imperial College, London and at a research laboratory in Germany. In 1927, Meghnad Saha was elected as a fellow of London's Royal Society. Meghnad Saha moved to Allahabad and in 1932 Uttar Pradesh Academy of Science was established. He returned to Science College, Calcutta in 1938. During this time Saha got interested in Nuclear Physics. In 1947, he established Institute of Nuclear Physics which later was named after him as Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. He took the first effort to include Nuclear Physics in the curriculum of higher studies of science. Having seen cyclotrons used for research in nuclear physics abroad, he ordered one to be installed in the institute. In 1950, India had its first cyclotron in operation.
Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, CSI, CIE, FRS (30 November 1858 23 November 1937) was a Bengali polymath: a physicist, biologist, botanist, archaeologist, as well as an early writer of science fiction. He pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, made very significant contributions to plant science, and laid the foundations of experimental science in the Indian subcontinent. IEEE named him one of the fathers of radio science. He is also considered the father of Bengali science fiction. He was the first person from the Indian subcontinent to receive a US patent, in 1904.
There, despite racial discrimination and a lack of funding and equipment, Bose carried on his scientific research. He made remarkable progress in his research of remote wireless signaling and was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio signals. However, instead of trying to gain commercial benefit from this invention Bose made his inventions public in order to allow others to further develop his research.
He was the first to prove that plants and metals too have feelings.
In 1894, Jagadish Chandra Bose decided to devote himself to pure research. He converted a small enclosure adjoining a bathroom in the Presidency College into a laboratory. He carried out experiments involving refraction, diffraction and polarization. It would not be wrong to call him as the inventor of wireless telegraphy. In 1895, a year before Guglielmo Marconi patented this invention, he had demonstrated its functioning in public. Jagdish Chandra Bose later switched from physics to the study of metals and then plants. He fabricated a highly sensitive "coherer", the device that detects radio waves. He found that the sensitivity of the coherer decreased when it was used continuously for a long period and it regained its sensitivity when he gave the device some rest. He thus concluded that metals have feelings and memory.
Although Jagdish Chandra Bose did invaluable work in Science, his work was recognized in the country only when the Western world recognized its importance. He founded the Bose Institute at Calcutta, devoted mainly to the study of plants. Today, the Institute carries research on other fields too.
Homi Bhabha, whose full name was Homi Jehnagir Bhabha, was a famous Indian atomic scientist. In Independent India, Homi Jehnagir Bhabha, with the support of Jawaharlal Nehru, laid the foundation of a premier institutions, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Bhabha scientific establishment and was responsible for the creation of two Atomic Research Centre. Homi Bhabha was the first chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission and was chairman of the first United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, held in Geneva in 1955.
He worked with Neil's Bohr on the studies that led to quantum theory. Homi Jehnagir Bhabha also worked with Walter Heitler on the cascade theory of electron showers, which was of great importance for the understanding of cosmic radiation. He did significant work in
identifying the meson.
He established the Atomic Energy Commission of India in 1948. Under his guidance Indian scientists worked on the development of atomic energy, and the first atomic reactor in Asia went into operation at Trombay, near Bombay, in 1956.
He advocated international control of nuclear energy and the outlawing of atomic bombs by all countries. He wanted nuclear energy to be used for alleviating poverty and misery of people.
Homi Bhabha received many honorary degrees from Indian and foreign universities and was a member of numerous scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. He also authored many articles on quantum theory and cosmic rays.
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao FRS known as C R Rao (born 10 September 1920) is an Indian statistician. He is currently professor emeritus at Penn State University and Research Professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao has been honored by numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts and was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2002. The American Statistical Association has described him as "a living legend whose work has influenced not just statistics, but has had far reaching implications for fields as varied as economics, genetics, anthropology, geology, national planning, demography, biometry, and medicine.
CR Rao was born in Hadagali, Karnataka, India. He received an MSc degree in mathematics from Andhra University and an MSc degree in statistics from Calcutta University in 1943. Apart from Padm Vibhushan award from Govt. of India recently, the UK government awarded the Guy Medal in Gold, the highest prize for innovative contributions to statistics on Jan, 18, 2011. This is the first time in 100 years that the medal is being awarded to a non European.