Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen "A. P. J.
" Abdul Kalam ; 15 October 1931 27 July 2015)
was the 11th President of India from 2002 to 2007. A career scientist turned politician,
Kalam was born and raised in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, and studied physics and
aerospace engineering. He spent the next four decades as a scientist and science
administrator,
mainly
at
the Defence
Research
and
Development
Organisation (DRDO) and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and was
intimately involved in India's civilian space programme and military missile
development efforts.[1] He thus came to be known as the Missile Man of India for his
work on the development of ballistic missile and launch vehicle technology.[2][3][4] He
also played a pivotal organisational, technical, and political role in India's PokhranII nuclear tests in 1998, the first since the original nuclear test by India in 1974.[5]
Kalam was elected as the 11th President of India in 2002 with the support of both the
ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the then-opposition Indian National Congress.
Widely referred to as the "People's President," [6] he returned to his civilian life of
education, writing and public service after a single term. He was a recipient of several
prestigious awards, including the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour.
Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman[2] (7 November 1888 21 November 1970)
was an Indian physicist born in the former Madras Province in India, who carried out
ground-breaking work in the field of light scattering, which earned him the 1930 Nobel
Prize for Physics. He discovered that when light traverses a transparent material,
some of the deflected light changes in wavelength. This phenomenon, subsequently
known as Raman scattering, results from the Raman effect.[3] In 1954, India honoured
him with its highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna.[4][5]
Raman's father initially taught in a school in Thiruvanaikaval, became a lecturer of
mathematics and physics in Mrs. A.V. Narasimha Rao College, Visakhapatnam (then
Vishakapatnam) in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, and later joined Presidency
College in Madras (now Chennai).[1][6]
Srinivasa
Ramanujan FRS (pronunciation:
/rinivs rmndn/;
22
December 1887 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician and autodidact.
Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made extraordinary
contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued
fractions. Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation; it
was quickly recognized by Indian mathematicians. When his skills became obvious
and known to the wider mathematical community, centred in Europe at the time, he
began a partnership with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy. The Cambridge
professor realized that Ramanujan had produced new theorems in addition to
rediscovering previously known ones.
During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results
(mostly identities and equations).[1] Nearly all his claims have now been proven
correct.[2]His original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan
prime and the Ramanujan theta function, have inspired a vast amount of further
research.[3]The Ramanujan Journal, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, was established
to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan.[4]
Deeply religious,[5] Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities
to divinity: '"An equation for me has no meaning," he once said, "unless it expresses a
thought of God."'[6]
Satyendra Nath Bose (Bengali: ), FRS[2] (1 January 1894 4 February
1974) was a Bengali physicist specialising in mathematical physics. He is best known
for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation
for BoseEinstein
statistics and
the
theory
of
the BoseEinstein
condensate.
A Fellow of theRoyal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award,
the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India.[4][5][6]
The class of particles that obey BoseEinstein statistics, bosons, was named after
Bose by Paul Dirac.[7][8]
A self-taught scholar and a polyglot, he had a wide range of interests in varied fields
including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts,
literature, and music. He served on many research and development committees in
sovereign India.[9]
Sir Jagdish
Chandra
Bose,[1] CSI,[2] CIE,[3] FRS[4] (/bos/;[5] Bengali
pronunciation: [dgodi tndro bosu]; 30 November 1858 23 November 1937) was
a polymath,physicist, biologist, biophysicist, botanist and archaeologist, as well as an
early writer of science fiction.[6] Living in British India, he pioneered the investigation of
radio andmicrowave optics, made very significant contributions to plant science, and
laid the foundations of experimental science in the Indian subcontinent.[7] IEEE named
him one of the fathers of radio science.[8] He is considered the father of Bengali
science fiction. He also invented the crescograph. A crater on the moon has been
named in his honour.[9]
Born in Munshiganj, Bengal Presidency during the British Raj,[10] Bose graduated
from St. Xavier's College, Calcutta. He then went to the University of London to study
medicine, but could not pursue studies in medicine because of health problems.
Instead, he conducted his research with the Nobel Laureate Lord Rayleigh at
Cambridge and returned to India. He then joined the Presidency College of 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
remarkable progress in his research of remote wireless signalling and was the first to
use semiconductorjunctions 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.
