Yella Pragadala Subbharao

He was born to a poor niyogi brahmin family in Bhimavaram of the Old Madras Presidency, now in West Godavary District, Andhra Pradesh. He passed through a traumatic period in his schooling at Rajahmundry (due to the premature death of close relations by disease) and eventually matriculated in his third attempt from the Hindu High School, Madras. He passed the Intermediate Examination from the Presidency College and entered the Madras Medical College where his education was supported by friends and Kasturi Suryanarayana Murthy, whose daughter he later married. Following Gandhi's call to boycott British goods he started wearing khadi surgical dress; this incurred the displeasure of M. C. Bradfield, his surgery professor. Consequently, though he did well in his written papers, he was awarded the lesser LMS certificate and not a full MBBS degree.

Subbarao tried to enter the Madras Medical Service without success. He then took up a job as Lecturer in Anatomy at Dr. Lakshmipathi's Ayurvedic College at Madras. He was fascinated by the healing powers of Ayurvedic medicines and began to engage in research to put Ayurveda on a modern footing.

A chance meeting with an American doctor, who was visiting on a Rockefeller Scholarship, changed his mind. The promise of support from Satyalinga Naicker Charities and Malladi Charities, Kakinada and financial assistance raised by his father-in-law, enabled Subbarao to proceed to the U.S. He arrived in Boston on October 26, 192

Satyendra Nath Bose

Satyendra Nath Bose was born on New Years day, 1894 in Goabaganin 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.

Meghnad Saha

Meghnad Saha was born on 6 October 1893 in Sheoratali village near
Dhaka in present day Bangladesh. His father Jagannath Saha was a grocer inthe village. After primary education, he was admitted to a middle school thatwas seven miles away from home. He stayed with a doctor near the schooland had to work in that house to pay for his boarding and lodging. Overcomingall these difficulties, he stood first in the Dhaka middle school test, thussecuring 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

Meghnad Saha

Meghnad Saha was born on 6 October 1893 in Sheoratali village near
Dhaka in present day Bangladesh. His father Jagannath Saha was a grocer inthe village. After primary education, he was admitted to a middle school thatwas seven miles away from home. He stayed with a doctor near the schooland had to work in that house to pay for his boarding and lodging. Overcomingall these difficulties, he stood first in the Dhaka middle school test, thussecuring 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

Dr.P.C.Ray

A Professor of Chemistry in the University. A pioneer in the field of pharmaceutical industry in India who started making chemicals at home -eighty years ago, to prevent foreign companies making excessive profits at the cost of Indian patients.

A scientist who won international acclaim. His dwelling - a simple room on the first floor of the college in which he was teaching; his household -students who could not afford to stay elsewhere.

His salary - all a donation to thedepartment of Chemistry. The income from this donation to be spent on the development of the department of Chemistry at the
University College of Science and to give scholarships to needy students. And the total amount he donated in this way - two lake rupees.

Such was the Scientist-Professor Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray.

Har Gobind Khorana

         

                 Har Gobind Khorana is an American molecular biologist born on 9 January 1922 to an Indian Punjabi couple. For his work on the interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in the year 1968. This award was, however, also shared by Robert W. Holley and Marshall Warren Nirenberg. The very same year, he received another award ‘Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize’ along with Nirenberg that was presented to them by the Columbia University.

           Har Gobind Khorana, who became a citizen of the United States of America in the year 1966. In present times, he’s residing at Cambridge in Massachusetts, United States as a part of the MIT Chemistry faculty. Har Gobind Khorana was also the first to produce oligonucleotides, which are chains of nucleotides. He was also the first person to segregate DNA ligase, an enzyme that connects sections of DNA together. These custom-designed portions of artificial genes are extensively used in biology labs for sequencing, cloning and engineering new plants and animals. This invention by Dr. Khorana has become automated and commercialized so that anyone now can order a synthetic gene from any of a number of companies. Thus, this is the history of the life of Dr Har Gobind Khorana as a biologist.

Vikram Sarabhai

Vikram Sarabhai was one of the greatest scientists of India. He is considered as the Father of the Indian space program. Apart from being a scientist, he was a rare combination of an innovator, industrialist and visionary. Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai was born on August 12, 1919 at Ahmedabad in an affluent family of progressive industrialists. He was one of eight children of Ambalal and Sarla Devi. He had his early education in a private school, “Retreat” run by his parents on Montessori lines. Some of the great men of India such as Gurudev Rabindranath, J. Krishna Murthi, Motilal Nehru, V. S. Shrinivasa Shastri, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Maulana Azad, C. F. Andrews, C. V. Raman et al. used to stay with the Sarabhai family when they visited Ahmedabad. Mahatma Gandhi also once stayed at their house while recovering from an illness. Visits by such great men greatly influenced Vikram Sarabhai.

After his matriculation, Vikram Sarabhai proceeded to Cambridge for his college education and took the tripods degree from St. John’s college in 1940. When World War II began, he returned home and joined as a research scholar under Sir C. V. Raman at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore His interest in solar physics and cosmic ray led him to set up many observation stations around the country. He built the necessary equipment with which he took measurements at Bangalore, Poona and the Himalayas. He returned to Cambridge in 1945 and completed his Ph.D in 1947.

Vikram Sarabhai was instrumental in establishing the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad in November 1947. The laboratory was established in a few rooms in M.G. Science Institute of the Ahmedabad Education Society, which was founded by his parents. Subsequently, it got support from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Department of Atomic Energy. Vikram Sarabhai did research on the time variations of cosmic rays and concluded that meteorological effects could not entirely affect the observed daily variations of cosmic rays; further, the residual variations were wide and global and these were related to variations in solar activity. Vikram Sarabhai visualized a new field of research opening up in solar and interplanetary Physics.

The year 1957-1958 was designated as International Geo-physical year (IGY). The Indian program for the IGY had been one of the most significant ventures of Sarabhai. It exposed him to the new vistas of space science with the launching in 1957 of Sputnik-I. Subsequently, the Indian National Committee for Space Research was created, of which Vikram Sarabhai became Chairman. With active support from Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, set up the first Rocket Launching station (TERLS) in the country at Thumba near Thiruvananthapuram on the Arabian Coast, as Thumba is very close to the Equator. The first rocket with sodium vapour payload was launched on November 21, 1963. In 1965, the UN General Assembly gave recognition to TERLS as an international facility.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Achievements: Ramanujan independently discovered results of Gauss, Kummer and others on hypergeometric series. Ramanujan’s own work on partial sums and products of hypergeometric series have led to major development in the topic. His most famous work was on the number p(n) of partitions of an integer n into summands.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a mathematician par excellence. He is widely believed to be the greatest mathematician of the 20th Century. Srinivasa Ramanujan made significant contribution to the analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan was born on December 22, 1887 in Erode, Tamil Nadu. His father worked in Kumbakonam as a clerk in a cloth merchant’s shop. At the of five Ramanujan went to primary school in Kumbakonam. In 1898 at age 10, he entered the Town High School in Kumbakonam. At the age of eleven he was lent books on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney by two lodgers at his home who studied at the Government College. He mastered them by the age of thirteen. Ramanujan was a bright student, winning academic prizes in high school.

At age of 16 his life took a decisive turn after he obtained a book titled” A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics”. The book was simply a compilation of thousands of mathematical results, most set down with little or no indication of proof. The book generated Ramanujan’s interest in mathematics and he worked through the book’s results and beyond. By 1904 Ramanujan had begun to undertake deep research. He investigated the series (1/n) and calculated Euler’s constant to 15 decimal places. He began to study the Bernoulli numbers, although this was entirely his own independent discovery. He was given a scholarship to the Government College in Kumbakonam which he entered in 1904. But he neglected his other subjects at the cost of mathematics and failed in college examination. He dropped out of the college.

Ramanujan lived off the charity of friends, filling notebooks with mathematical discoveries and seeking patrons to support his work. In 1906 Ramanujan went to Madras where he entered Pachaiyappa’s College. His aim was to pass the First Arts examination which would allow him to be admitted to the University of Madras. Continuing his mathematical work Ramanujan studied continued fractions and divergent series in 1908. At this stage he became seriously ill again and underwent an operation in April 1909 after which he took him some considerable time to recover.

On 14 July 1909 Ramanujan marry a ten year old girl S Janaki Ammal. During this period Ramanujan had his first paper published, a 17-page work on Bernoulli numbers that appeared in 1911 in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society. In 191,1 Ramanujan approached the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society for advice on a job. He got the job of clerk at the Madras Port Trust with the help of Indian mathematician Ramachandra Rao.

The professor of civil engineering at the Madras Engineering College C L T Griffith was interested in Ramanujan’s abilities and, having been educated at University College London, knew the professor of mathematics there, namely M J M Hill. He wrote to Hill on 12 November 1912 sending some of Ramanujan’s work and a copy of his 1911 paper on Bernoulli numbers. Hill replied in a fairly encouraging way but showed that he had failed to understand Ramanujan’s results on divergent series. In January 1913 Ramanujan wrote to G H Hardy having seen a copy of his 1910 book Orders of infinity. Hardy, together with Littlewood, studied the long list of unproved theorems which Ramanujan enclosed with his letter. Hardy wrote back to Ramanujan and evinced interest in his work.

University of Madras gave Ramanujan a scholarship in May 1913 for two years and, in 1914, Hardy brought Ramanujan to Trinity College, Cambridge, to begin an extraordinary collaboration. Right from the start Ramanujan’s collaboration with Hardy led to important results. In a joint paper with Hardy, Ramanujan gave an asymptotic formula for p(n). It had the remarkable property that it appeared to give the correct value of p(n), and this was later proved by Rademacher.

Ramanujan had problems settling in London. He was an orthodox Brahmin and right from the beginning he had problems with his diet. The outbreak of World War I made obtaining special items of food harder and it was not long before Ramanujan had health problems. On 16 March 1916 Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science by Research. He had been allowed to enrol in June 1914 despite not having the proper qualifications. Ramanujan’s dissertation was on Highly composite numbers and consisted of seven of his papers published in England.

Vikram Sarabhai

Vikram Sarabhai was one of the greatest scientists of India. He is considered as the Father of the Indian space program. Apart from being a scientist, he was a rare combination of an innovator, industrialist and visionary. Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai was born on August 12, 1919 at Ahmedabad in an affluent family of progressive industrialists. He was one of eight children of Ambalal and Sarla Devi. He had his early education in a private school, “Retreat” run by his parents on Montessori lines. Some of the great men of India such as Gurudev Rabindranath, J. Krishna Murthi, Motilal Nehru, V. S. Shrinivasa Shastri, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Maulana Azad, C. F. Andrews, C. V. Raman et al. used to stay with the Sarabhai family when they visited Ahmedabad. Mahatma Gandhi also once stayed at their house while recovering from an illness. Visits by such great men greatly influenced Vikram Sarabhai.

After his matriculation, Vikram Sarabhai proceeded to Cambridge for his college education and took the tripods degree from St. John’s college in 1940. When World War II began, he returned home and joined as a research scholar under Sir C. V. Raman at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore His interest in solar physics and cosmic ray led him to set up many observation stations around the country. He built the necessary equipment with which he took measurements at Bangalore, Poona and the Himalayas. He returned to Cambridge in 1945 and completed his Ph.D in 1947.

Vikram Sarabhai was instrumental in establishing the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad in November 1947. The laboratory was established in a few rooms in M.G. Science Institute of the Ahmedabad Education Society, which was founded by his parents. Subsequently, it got support from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Department of Atomic Energy. Vikram Sarabhai did research on the time variations of cosmic rays and concluded that meteorological effects could not entirely affect the observed daily variations of cosmic rays; further, the residual variations were wide and global and these were related to variations in solar activity. Vikram Sarabhai visualized a new field of research opening up in solar and interplanetary Physics.

The year 1957-1958 was designated as International Geo-physical year (IGY). The Indian program for the IGY had been one of the most significant ventures of Sarabhai. It exposed him to the new vistas of space science with the launching in 1957 of Sputnik-I. Subsequently, the Indian National Committee for Space Research was created, of which Vikram Sarabhai became Chairman. With active support from Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, set up the first Rocket Launching station (TERLS) in the country at Thumba near Thiruvananthapuram on the Arabian Coast, as Thumba is very close to the Equator. The first rocket with sodium vapour payload was launched on November 21, 1963. In 1965, the UN General Assembly gave recognition to TERLS as an international facility.

Meghnad Saha

Meghnad Saha was an outstanding Indian scientist. He made remarkable contribution to the field of Astrophysics. Meghnad Saha was born on October 6, 1893 in Sheoratali, a village in the District of Dacca, now in Bangladesh. He was the fifth child of his parents, Sri Jagannath Saha and Smt. Bhubaneshwari Devi. His father was a grocer in the village. 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. agdish Chandra Bose was an eminent Indian scientist. He was the first to prove that plants and metals too have feelings. Jagdish Chandra Bose was born on November 30, 1858 in Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh). His father Bhagabanchandra Bose was a Deputy Magistrate. Jagadish Chandra Bose had his early education in village school in Bengal medium. In 1869, Jagadish Chandra Bose was sent to Calcutta to learn English and was educated at St.Xavier’s School and College. He was a brilliant student. He passed the B.A. in physical sciences in 1879.


In 1905, British Government took the decision of partition of Bengal. There was great political unrest in Bengal as popular opinion was against the partition. Sir Bampfylde Fuller was governor of East Bengal at that time. One day he came to visit the collegiate school. Meghnad Saha along with other students boycotted his visit. As a result he was suspended from the school and his scholarship was terminated. He took admission in the Kishorilal Jubili School and passed the Entrance Examination of the Calcutta University in 1909, standing first among the student from East Bengal obtaining the highest marks in languages (English, Bengali and Sanskrit combined) and in Mathematics. 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. While studying in Presidency College, Meghnad got involved with Anushilan Samiti to take part in freedom fighting movement. He also came in contact with nationalists like Subhash Chandra Bose and Rajendra Prasad.

Homi Bhabha

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 scientific establishment and was responsible for the creation of two premier institutions, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Homi Bhabha was the first chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission.

Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born on October 30, 1909, in Bombay in a rich Parsi family. After graduating from Elphinstone College and the Royal Institute of Science in Bombay, he went to Cambridge University. He received his doctorate in 1934. During this period he worked with Niels 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.

Due to outbreak of Second World War, Homi Jehangir Bhabha, returned to India in 1939. He set up the Cosmic Ray Research Unit at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore under C. V. Raman in 1939. With the help of J.R.D. Tata, he established the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research at Mumbai. In 1945, he became director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

Apart from being a great scientist, Homi Bhabha, was also a skilled administrator. After independence he received the blessings of Jawaharlal Nehru for peaceful development of atomic energy. 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.

C.V. Raman

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.

Chandrashekhara Venkata Raman was born on November 7, 1888 in Tiruchinapalli, Tamil Nadu. He was the second child of Chandrasekhar Iyer and Parvathi Amma. His father was a lecturer in mathematics and physics, so he had an academic atmosphere at home. He entered Presidency College, Madras, in 1902, and in 1904 passed his B.A. examination, winning the first place and the gold medal in physics. In 1907, C.V. Raman passed his M.A. obtaining the highest distinctions.

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”.

A.P.J Abdul Kalam

'India's Missile Man', Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam has done the country proud on many fronts.
Born on 15 October 1931 at Dhanushkodi in the Rameswaram district of Tamil Nadu, Abdul Kalam's father had to rent boats out to fishermen to pay this genius' school fees. He received secondary education at the Schwartz School, a missionary institute in Ramanathapuram, and later joined the St Joseph's College at Tiruchirrapalli, where he graduated with a Bachelor in Science. Abdul Kalam went on to study Aeronautical Engineering at the Madras Institute of Technology.

"Do things yourself. Do not indulge in short-cuts by importing equipment", thundered the great scientist after the famed Pokhran-2 nuclear blasts in 1998. A strong advocate of this philosophy, he distributed newspapers at a young age to help with household expenses.

Thoroughly Indian, the only brief exposure that he got abroad was in 1963-64 when he was invited by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) to spend four months in the United States at the Wallops Island Rocketry Centre and the Langley Research Centre.

Abdul Kalam joined the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) in 1958 and in his forty-year career as a scientist, achieved many milestones. He later joined the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) where he succeeded in putting the 35-kg Rohini-I satellite on a low-earth orbit with help of the SLV-III (Satellite Launch Vehicle). After spending 19 fruitful years in ISRO, he returned to DRDO to head the country's Integrated Missile Development Programme, which culminated in the successful launch of the Agni and Prithvi missiles.