A Microproject Report ON: "Eminent Indian Scientists"
A Microproject Report ON: "Eminent Indian Scientists"
MICROPROJECT REPORT
ON
“EMINENT INDIAN SCIENTISTS”
SUBMITTED BY:
KANSE PRATIKSHA
KARLEKAR SUPRIYA
WAGHULE NISHA
METE SHRUTIKA
SURYAVANSHI SUMIT
Prof.BABAR.N.D
1
DEPARTMENT OF MEDICAL ENGINEERING
CERTIFICATE
This is certified that Mr. KANSE PRATIKSHA,KARLEKAR SUPRIYA,WAGHULE
NISHA,METE SHRUTIKA,SURYAVANSHI SUMIT Roll No. 21,22,23,24,25 of First
Semester of Diploma in Medical Engginerring of institute HSBPVT’s Parikrama
Polytechnic, Kashti (Code :1169) has completed the micro-project satisfactorily in course
ENGLISH (ENG)for the academic year 2022-2023s prescribed in the curriculum.
Place – Kashti
Teacher
Principal
2
CONTEXT
SR.NO SUBJECT PAGE.NO
1 AIM 04
2 INTRODUCTION 04
3 SIR.JAGADISH CHANDRA BOSE 05
4 PRAFULLA CHANDRA RAY 06
5 SHRINIVASA RAMANJUAN 07
6 SIR.CHANDRASEKHARA VENKATA RAMAN 08
7 MEGHNAD SAHA 09
8 SATYENDRA NATH BOSE 10
9 SHANTI SWARUP BHATNAGAR 11
10 HOMI JEHANGIR BHABHA 12
11 SUBRAMANIAM CHANDRASEKHAR 13
12 VIKRAM SARABHAI 14
13 C.R.RAO 15
14 K. CHANDRASEKHARAN 16
15 HAR GOBIND KHORANA 17
16 G.N.RAMACHANDRAN 18
17 HARISH CHANDRA 19
18 M.K.VAINU BAPPU 20
19 CONCLUSION 21
3
AIM :
A scientist is a professional who conducts and gathers research to further knowledge in a
particular area. Scientists may make hypotheses, test them through various means such as
statistics and data and formulate conclusions based on the evidence. There are several types
of scientists and nearly every industry requires the knowledge and research performed by
these professionals.
INTRODUCTION :
A scientist is a person who studies or has mastered the field in science. A scientist tries to
understand how our world, or other things, work. Scientists make observations, ask questions
and do extensive research work in finding the answers to many questions.
Scientists may work
in laboratories for governments, companies, schools and research institutions. Some
scientists teach at universities and other places and train people to become scientists.
Scientists often do experiments to find out more about reality, and sometimes may repeat
experiments or use control groups. Scientists who are doing applied science try to use
scientific knowledge to improve the world.
4
SIR JAGDHISH CHANDRA BOSE :
Jagadish Chandra Bose was born on 30 November 1858, in Myemsingh, Faridpur, a
part of the Dhaka District now in Bangladesh. He attended the village school till he was 11. He then
moved to Kolkata where he enrolled in St. Xavier’s. He was very much interested in Biology.
However, Father La font, a famous Professor of Physics, inspired in Bose a great interest in
Physics.
He returned to India in 1885 and joined Presidency College, Kolkata as an Assistant Professor
of Physics, where he remained till 1915. There was a peculiar practice in the college at that
time. The Indian teachers in the college were paid one third of what the British teachers were
paid! So Bose refused his salary but worked for three years. The fourth year he was paid in full!
He was an excellent teacher, extensively using scientific demonstrations in class. Some of his
students, such as S. N. Bose went on to become famous physicists themselves.
During this period, Bose also started doing original scientific work in the area of microwaves,
carrying out experiments involving refraction, diffraction and polarization. He developed the use of
galena crystals for making receivers, both for short wavelength radio waves and for white and
ultraviolet light. In 1895, two years before Marconi’s demonstration, Bose demonstrated wireless
communication using radio waves, using them to ring a bell remotely and to explode some
gunpowder
Many of the microwave components familiar today - waveguides, horn antennas,
polarizers, dielectric lenses and prisms, and even semiconductor detectors of electromagnetic
radiation - were invented and used by Bose in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He also
suggested the existence of electromagnetic radiation from the Sun, which was confirmed in
1944.
Bose then turned his attention to response phenomena in plants. He showed that not only
animal but vegetable tissues, produce similar electric response under different kinds of stimuli –
mechanical, thermal, electrical and chemical.
Bose was knighted in 1917 and soon thereafter elected Fellow of the Royal Society,
London, (both as physicist and biologist!). Bose had worked all along without the right kind of
scientific instruments and laboratory. For a long time he had been thinking of building a laboratory.
The result was the establishment of the Bose Research Institute in Kolkata. It continues to be a
famous centre of research in basic sciences.
5
PRAFULLA CHANDRA RAY :
Prafulla Chandra was born on 2 August 1861 in Raruli-Katipara, a village in the District of
Khulna (in present day Bangladesh). His early education started in his village school. He often
played truant and spent his time resting comfortably on the branch of a tree, hidden under its
leaves. After attending the village school, he went to Kolkata, where he studied at Hare
School and the Metropolitan College. The lectures of Alexander Pedler in the Presidency College,
which he used to attend, attracted him to chemistry, although his first love was literature. He
continued to take interest in literature, and taught himself Latin and French at home. After
obtaining a F.A. diploma from the University of Calcutta, he proceeded to the University of
Edinburgh on a Gilchrist scholarship where he obtained both his B.Sc. and D.Sc. degrees.
In 1888, Prafulla Chandra made his journey home to India. Initially he spent a year
working with his famous friend Jagadish Chandra Bose in his laboratory. In 1889, Prafulla Chandra
was appointed an Assistant Professor of Chemistry in the Presidency College, Kolkata. His
publications on mercurous nitrite and its derivatives brought him recognition from all over the
world. Equally important was his role as a teacher - he inspired a generation of young chemists in
India thereby building up an Indian school of chemistry. Famous Indian scientists like Meghnad
Saha and Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar were among his students.
Prafulla Chandra believed that the progress of India could be achieved only by
industrialization. He set up the first chemical factory in India, with very minimal resources,
working from his home. In 1901, this pioneering effort resulted in the formation of the Bengal
Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works Ltd.
He retired from the Presidency College in 1916, and was appointed as Professor of
Chemistry at the University Science College. In 1921 when Prafulla Chandra reached 60 years,
he donated, in advance, all his salary for the rest of his service in the University to the
development of the Department of Chemistry and to the creation of two research fellowships.
The value of this endowment was about two lakh rupees. He eventually retired at the age of
75. In Prafulla Chandra Ray, the qualities of both a scientist and an industrial entrepreneur were
combined and he can be thought of as the father of the Indian Pharmaceutical industry.
6
SHRINIVASA RAMANUJAN :
Ramanujan was born in Erode, a small village in Tamil Nadu on 22 December 1887. When
he was a year old his family moved to the town of Kumbakonam, where his father worked as a
clerk in a cloth merchant’s shop. When he was nearly five years old, Ramanujan enrolled in the
primary school. In 1898 he joined the Town High School in Kumbakonam. At the Town High
School, Ramanujan did well in all subjects and proved himself an able all round scholar. It
was here that he came across the book Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics by G.
S. Carr. Influenced by the book, he began working on mathematics on his own, summing
geometric and arithmetic series.
7
CHANDRASEKHARA VENKATA RAMAN :
Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu on 7 November
1888. His father was a lecturer in mathematics and physics so from the very beginning he was
immersed in an academic atmosphere. Raman’s academic brilliance was established at a very
young age. He finished his secondary school education at the tender age of thirteen and entered
the Mrs. A.V.N. College at Vishakapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. Two years later he moved to the
prestigious Presidency College in Chennai.
When he was fifteen, he topped his class to receive his B.A. degree with honours in
Physics and English. Raman continued his studies at the Presidency College and when he was
barely eighteen, graduated at the top of his class and received his M.A. degree with honours.
Raman joined the Indian Audit and Accounts Service and was appointed the Assistant
Accountant General in the Finance Department in Kolkata. In Kolkata, he sustained his interest
in science by working in the laboratory of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science,
in his spare time studying the physics of stringed instruments and Indian drums.
In 1917, Raman gave up his government job to become the Sir Taraknath Palit Professor
of Physics at the Science College of University of Calcutta (1917-33). He made enormous
contributions to research in the areas of vibration, sound, musical instruments,
ultrasonics, diffraction, photoelectricity, colloidal particles, X-ray diffraction, magnetron,
dielectrics, etc. In particular, his work on the scattering of light during this period brought him
world-wide recognition.
In 1924 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and a year later was
honoured with the prestigious Hughes medal from the Royal Society. Four years later, at the joint
meeting of the South Indian Science Association and the Science Club of Central College,
Bangalore, he announced his discovery of what is now known as the Raman Effect.
He was knighted in 1929, and in 1930, became the first Asian scientist to be awarded the
Nobel Prize for Physics for his discoveries relating to the scattering of light (the Raman Effect). In
1934, he became the Director of the newly established Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore,
where he remained till his retirement. After retirement, he established the Raman Research Institute
at Bangalore, where he served as the Director. The Government of India conferred upon him its
highest award,the Bharat Ratna in 1954.
8
MEGHNAD SHAH :
Meghnad Saha was born on 6 October 1893 in Sheoratali village near Dhaka in present
day Bangladesh. His father Jagannath Saha was a grocer in the village. After primary education,
he was admitted to a middle school that was seven miles away from home. He stayed with a
doctor near the school and had to work in that house to pay for his boarding and lodging.
Overcoming all these difficulties, he stood first in the Dhaka middle school test, thus securing a
Government scholarship and joined the Dhaka Collegiate School in 1905.
Great political unrest was prevailing in Bengal, caused by the partition of the province
by the British against strong popular opinion. Meghnad Saha was among the few senior students
who staged a boycott of the visit by the then Governor, Sir Bampfylde Fuller and as a
consequence forfeited his scholarship and had to leave the institution. He then joined the Kisori
Lal Jubilee School where he passed the entrance test of the University of Calcutta standing first
among students from East Bengal. He graduated from Presidency College with mathematics as his
major.
He then joined the newly established Science College in Kolkata as a lecturer and pursued
his research activities in physics. By 1920, Meghnad Saha had established himself as one of the
leading physicists of the time. His theory of high-temperature ionization of elements and its
application to stellar atmospheres, as expressed by the Saha equation, is fundamental to modern
astrophysics; subsequent development of his ideas has led to increased knowledge of the pressure
and temperature distributions of stellar atmospheres.
In 1920, Saha went to Imperial College, London and later to Germany. Two years later he
returned to India and joined the University of Calcutta as Khaira Professor. He then moved to the
University of Allahabad and remained there till 1938, establishing the Science Academy in
Allahabad (now known as the National Academy of Science). In 1927, he was elected a Fellow of
the Royal Society of London.
He returned to the University of Calcutta in 1938 where he introduced nuclear physics into
the post-graduate physics curriculum. In 1947 he established the Indian Institute of Nuclear
Physics (now known as the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics). Later in his life, Saha played an
active role in the development of scientific institutions throughout India as well as in national
economic planning involving technology.
9
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.
10
SHANTI SWARUP BHATNAGAR :
Bhatnagar was born on 21 February 1894 at Bhera, in the district of Shapur in Punjab
(now in Pakistan). When he was barely eight months old, his father passed away. He spent his
next thirteen years under the care of his maternal grandfather in Bulandshahar in Uttar Pradesh.
Under the influence of his grandfather, young Bhatnagar not only developed a taste for
engineering and science but also became interested at a very early age in geometry and algebra and
in making mechanical toys. In 1911, Shanti published a letter to the editor, in The Leader,
Allahabad, on how to make a substitute for carbon electrodes in a battery using molasses and
carbonaceous matter under pressure and heat.
Matriculating the same year, he joined the Dayal Singh College, Lahore. After finishing
his intermediate examination in first division, Shanti joined the Forman Christian College and after
his B.Sc and M.Sc degrees, he spent the next two years at the University of London earning his
D.Sc. degree on the surface tension of oils, under the supervision of Professor F.G. Donnan.
Returning to India in 1921, he joined the Benares Hindu University as a Professor,
remaining there till 1924. From 1924 to 1940 he served as the Director of the University Chemical
Laboratories, Lahore, addressing problems in industrial and applied chemistry.
In August 1940, Bhatnagar took over as the Director of the newly created Directorate of
Scientific and Industrial Research. This organisation became the Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research, with Bhatnagar as its Director. Bhatnagar’s tenure saw the setting up of
12 laboratories and the total number of CSIR laboratories today stands at 40.
The British Government conferred on him the Order of the British Empire and in 1941, he
was made the Knight Bachelor. In 1943 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and received
the Padma Vibhushan (1954) from the Government of India.
Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar played a significant part along with Homi Bhabha, Prasanta
Chandra Mahalanobis, Vikram Sarabhai and others in building of post-independence Science &
Technology infrastructure and in the formulation of India’s science policies.
11
HOMI JEHANGIR BHABHA :
Homi Bhabha was born on 30 October 1909 in Mumbai. Son of a barrister, he grew up in a
privileged environment. In Mumbai he attended the Cathedral & John Connon School and then
Elphinstone College, followed by the Royal Institute of Science. After passing the Senior
Cambridge Examination at the age of sixteen, he joined the Gonvile and Caius College in
Cambridge with an intention to pursue mechanical engineering. His mathematics tutor was Paul
Dirac, and Bhabha became fascinated with mathematics and theoretical physics. He earned
his engineering degree in 1930 and Ph.D. in 1934.
In 1937, together with W. Heitler, a German physicist, Bhabha solved the riddle about
cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are fast moving, extremely small particles coming from outer space.
When these particles enter the earth’s atmosphere, they collide with the atoms of air and create a
shower of electrons. Bhabha’s discovery of the presence of nuclear particles (which he called
mesons) in these showers was used to validate Einstein’s theory of relativity making him world
famous.
When the war broke out in Europe, Bhabha was on a holiday in India. In 1940, C.V.
Raman, then head of the Physics Department, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, persuaded
Bhabha to join the institute as a Reader in Physics and Bhabha decided to stay back in India. In
1941, Homi Bhabha was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, London, in recognition of his
contributions to the field of cosmic rays, elementary particles and quantum mechanics.
Bhabha soon realized the need for an institute fully devoted to fundamental research, and
wrote to J.R.D. Tata for funding. This resulted in the establishment of the Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai in 1945, with Bhabha as the Director, a position he
held until his death. In 1948, Homi Bhabha was appointed the Chairman of the International
Atomic Energy Commission. Under his guidance, nuclear reactors like the Apsara, Cirus and
Zerlina were built. He gained international recognition for his excellent work and served as the
President of the first United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, which
was held in Geneva in 1955. He was the President of the International Union of Pure and Applied
Physics from 1960 to 1963.
A multi-faceted personality, Bhabha was immensely fond of music, painting and writing.
Some of his paintings are displayed in the British Art Galleries and the TIFR art collection today is
rated as one of the best collections of contemporary Indian art in the country.
He is the recipient of the Adam’s Award, Padma Bhushan, an Honorary Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Foreign Associate of the National Academy of
Sciences in the United States.
12
SUBRAMANIAM CHANDRASEKHAR :
Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, a nephew of Sir C.V. Raman, was born on 19 October
1910 in Lahore, (now in Pakistan). His father was an officer in the Department of Audits and
Accounts of the Indian Government Services. Chandrasekhar received his elementary education
from his parents and private tutors when he was in Lahore. In 1918 Chandra moved to Chennai
where he attended the Hindu High School finishing his secondary school education with honours.
He then joined the Presidency College, there taking his Bachelor of Science degree in physics with
honours.
His first scientific paper, Compton Scattering and the New Statistics, was published in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1928. On the basis of this paper he was accepted as a
research student by R.H. Fowler at the University of Cambridge. On the voyage to England, he
developed the theory of white dwarf stars, showing that a star of mass greater than 1.45 times
the mass of the sun could not become a white dwarf. This limit is now known as the
Chandrasekhar limit.
He obtained his doctorate in 1933. Soon after receiving his doctorate, Chandrasekhar was
awarded the Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1937, he accepted the
position of Research Associate at the University of Chicago. Chandrasekhar stayed at University of
Chicago throughout his career, becoming the Morton D. Hall Distinguished Service Professor in
Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1952. In 1952 he established the Astrophysical Journal and was
its editor for 19 years, transforming it from a local publication of the University of Chicago into
the national journal of the American Astronomical Society. He became a US citizen in 1958.
He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London and in 1962 received the Society’s
Royal Medal. He also received the US National Medal of Science (1966). He was awarded the
Nobel prize for Physics in 1983 for his theoretical work on the physical processes of
importance to the structure of stars and their evolution. Chandra was a popular teacher who
guided over fifty students to their Ph.D.s including some who went on to win the Nobel prize
themselves!! His research explored nearly all branches of theoretical astrophysics and he published
ten books, each covering a different topic, including one on the relationship between art and
science.
13
VIKRAM SARABHAI :
Vikram Sarabhai was born on 12 August 1919 at Ahmedabad. He had his early education
in a private school, ‘Retreat’ run by his parents on Montessori lines. This atmosphere injected into
the young boy the seeds of scientific curiosity, ingenuity and creativity. With a natural inclination
towards physics and mathematics, Vikram Sarabhai did not get into his family business. After
school and college in Gujarat, he went to England and obtained his tripos at St. John’s College
in 1939. He returned to India for a while and worked alongside Sir C.V. Raman in the field of
cosmic rays, at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, after which he returned to Cambridge,
England for further research in the area and completed his Ph.D. in 1947.
He established the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad in 1948, in a few rooms
at the M.G. Science Institute with Professor K.K. Ramanathan as Director. In April 1954, PRL
moved into a new building and Dr. Sarabhai made it the cradle of the Indian Space Programme.
At the young age of 28, he was asked to organise and create the ATIRA, the Ahmedabad Textile
Industry’s Research Association and was its Honorary Director during 1949-56. He also helped
build and direct the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad from 1962-1965.
Sarabhai pioneered India’s space age by expanding the Indian Space Research
Organization. India’s first satellite Aryabhata launched in 1975, was one of the many projects
planned by him. Like Bhabha, Sarabhai wanted the practical application of science to reach the
common man. Thus he saw a golden opportunity to harness space science to the development of
the country in the fields of communication, meteorology, remote sensing and education. The
Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) launched in 1975- 76, brought education to
five million people in 2,400 Indian villages. In 1965, he established the Community Science
Centre in Ahmedabad with a view to popularise science among children. His deep cultural interests
led him, along with his wife Mrinalini Sarabhai, to establish Darpana Academy, an institution
devoted to performing arts and propagation of ancient culture of India.
He was the recipient of the Bhatnagar Memorial Award for Physics in 1962, the Padma
Bhushan in 1966, and was posthumously awarded the Padma Vibhushan. He was the Chairman of
the Atomic Energy Commission in 1966, Vice-President and Chairman of the UN Conference on
peaceful uses of outer space in 1968, and President of the 14th General Conference of the
International Atomic Energy Agency. The International Astronomical Union named a crater in
the moon (in the Sea of Serenity) after him, in honour of his contributions to science.
14
C.R.RAO :
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao was born to C.D. 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 father’s 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. A.V.N. College at Vishakapatnam for the Intermediate course. He received his
M.A. 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 one-year 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 M.A Statistics program of the Calcutta University. By the time he passed the M.A.
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
R.A. Fisher, the father of modern statistics and completed his Ph.D. under Fisher. By this time Rao
had already completed some of the work which carries his name: Cramer-Rao inequality, Rao-
Blackwell theorem, Rao’s score test and Rao’s 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, U.S.A. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 2001. The C.R. 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 U.S.A. The Advanced Institute of Mathematics,
Statistics and Computer Science in the Osmania University Campus has been named after him.
15
K.CHANDRASHEKHARAN :
Komaravolu Chandrasekharan was born on 21 November 1920 in Machilipatnam in
modern-day 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 M.A. in
Mathematics from the Presidency College, Chennai and was a Research Scholar in the
Department of Mathematics of the University of Madras during 1940-1943. During 1943-46
he was a part-time Lecturer at Presidency College and obtained his Ph.D. during this time under
Ananda Rau, who was with Ramanujan in Cambridge. Chandrasekharan then went to the Institute
for Advanced Study, Princeton, U.S.A.
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 C.L. 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 1955-61, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the International
Mathematical Union (IMU). He served as the Secretary of IMU during 1961-66 and as President
during 1971-74. 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 1963-66 and as its Secretary General during 1966-70. He was a member of the
Scientific Advisory Committee to the Cabinet, Government of India during 1961-66. 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.
16
HAR GOBIND KHORANA :
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 British-Indian system
of government. Har Gobind did his schooling from the D.A.V. High School in Multan. He received
his B.Sc. and M.Sc. 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 (1948-1949) at the Eidgenössische. Technische
Hochschule in Zurich, and then joined Cambridge University, England in 1950, where he
worked with Professors G.W. Kenner and Lord
A.R. Todd. In 1952 he went to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. The British
Columbia Research Council offered at that time very little by way of facilities, but there was
‘all the freedom in the world’, to do what the researcher liked to do. He became the Alfred Sloan
Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 and
is at present an Emeritus Professor at the Department of Biology at MIT.
Dr. Har Gobind Khorana shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1968
with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley for cracking the genetic code. They established that
this code, the biological language common to all living organisms, is spelled out in three-letter
words: each set of three nucleotides codes for a specific amino acid. Dr. Khorana was also the
first to synthesize oligonucleotides (strings of nucleotides). Today, oligonucleotides are
indispensable tools in biotechnology, widely used in biology labs for sequencing, cloning and
genetic engineering.
Khorana has won many awards and honors for his achievements, amongst them the Padma
Vibhushan, Membership of the National Academy of Sciences, USA as well as a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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G.N.RAMACHANDRAN :
G. N. Ramachandran was born on 8 October 1922 in Ernakulam, Kerala. His father G.
Narayana Iyer was the principal of Maharaja’s college in Ernakulam. Ramachandran did his
intermediate from Maharaja’s college and his B.Sc. (Hons) in Physics from St. Joseph’s
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 C.V. Raman, he shifted
to Physics. He obtained his M.Sc. and then his Ph.D. in 1947, under Raman’s supervision. He
then went to the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge and obtained his second Ph.D 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 J.D. 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 triple-helix 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 X-ray crystallography such as anomalous dispersion, new
kinds of Fourier syntheses, and X-ray intensity statistics are also extremely important. His 1971
paper with A.V. Lakshminarayanan on three-dimensional image reconstruction was to have
important applications in Computer Assisted Tomography. (The 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine was awarded to A.M. Cormack and Sir G.N. 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.
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HARISH CHANDRA :
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 master’s 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 Ph.D. 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 IBM-von 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.
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M.K.VAINU BAPPU :
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 Bappu-Bok-Newkirk, after Bappu and his colleagues Bart Bok and Gordon
Newkirk who worked out the details of this comet. He completed his Ph.D. 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 Bappu-Wilson
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 2.3 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 Comet-Medal (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.
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CONCLUTION :
The definition of a scientific conclusion in science is the summary of the results of an
experiment that is usually shared with peers or the general public. It is important to separate
this from a scientific theory, which is a data-driven explanation, usually of the natural world.
REFERENCE :
https://www.tifr.res.in/~outreach/biographies/scientists.pdf
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