Great Indian Scientists who Change the Modern Scientific world with their Great Knowledge

Great Indian Scientists  who Change the  Modern Scientific world with their  Great Knowledge

Science and Scientists were the major catalytic force for advancement of  Civilized  society. Throughtout the age Scientists  were work and utilized their knowledge silently for the betterment of society and technology.In India from the ancient time our scientists like Aryabhatta (Ancient Astronomy, Mathematecian) ,  Charak (Medicine) , Shrusruta (Great  ancient doctor and sergeon) and lots of unknown scientists  enhance and uplift  Hindu Vedic Civilization upto its highest level.Takshshila and Nalanda were the most famous and Prestigious ancient university around the ancient world.

After the the advent of Various invaders Like Saka, Huns, Pathan , Mughals, Portugese,French and Lastly British who invade and caputured  and exploit Indian economy ,richness,knowledge for their own Country`s betterment.  During this unpleasent and turmoiled time Indian Scientific work and knowledge scattered and destroyed which cause gradual degradation of Indian Scientific advancement and socielty.

At the same time Europian scientific community rule and enrich their knowledge throughout the world upto its highest level.

Again during the  last phase of the British rule with the inclusion of  English Education system in Indian College and University cause great influx of modern scientific knowledge from the Europian countrys .

This incident was the turning point of the Indian Scientific community. From that period of time Indian Scientists again gradually return to the right tract of Scientific advancement which is continue till today 64 years after  Indian Indipendence from British Raj.

Here I will discuss about  some renowned Indian Scientists and their works which enrich and uphold our Modern Indian civilization to the world.

I will discuss about Indian Scientists were from Later Phase of British Rai to till today in continuous order.

Lists Of Indian Scientists in Continuous Order:-

1) Acharya Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, (Bengali : 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. 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.

Born during the British Raj, 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 due to 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 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.

Bose subsequently made a number of pioneering discoveries in plant physiology. He used his own invention, the crescograph, to measure plant response to various stimuli, and thereby scientifically proved parallelism between animal and plant tissues. Although Bose filed for a patent for one of his inventions due to peer pressure, his reluctance to any form of patenting was well known.

He has been recognised for his many contributions to modern science.

2) Prafulla chandra Prafulla Chandra Ray ( Bengali :2 August 1861 – 16 June 1944) was a Indian academician, a chemist and entrepreneur. He was the founder of Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals, India's first pharmaceutical company. He is the author of A History of Hindu Chemistry from the Earliest Times to the Middle of Sixteenth Century (1902).

Prafulla Chandra returned to India in 1889 and joined Presidency College, Calcutta as Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Though at that time, the Chemistry department of Presidency College did not boast of any well-equipped world standard laboratory, but a lot of original chemical experimentation occurred there.

In 1896, he published a paper on preparation of a new stable chemical compound: Mercurous nitrite. This work made way for a large number of investigative papers on nitrites and hyponitrites of different metals, and on nitrites of ammonia and organic amines. He started a new Indian School of Chemistry in 1924.

3) Satyendra Nath Bose (Bengali ; 1 January 1894 – 4 February 1974) was an Indian Bengali mathematician and physicist noted for his collaboration with Albert Einstein in developing a theory regarding the gaslike qualities of electromagnetic radiation. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. He is honoured as the namesake of the boson.He was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India.

Although more than one Nobel Prize was awarded for research related to the concepts of the boson, Bose–Einstein statistics and Bose–Einstein condensate—the latest being the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was given for advancing the theory of Bose–Einstein condensates—Bose himself was not awarded the Nobel Prize. Among his other talents, Bose spoke several languages and could also play the esraj, a musical instrument similar to a violin.

In his book, The Scientific Edge, the noted physicist Jayant Narlikar observed:

“ S. N. Bose’s work on particle statistics (c. 1922), which clarified the behaviour of photons (the particles of light in an enclosure) and opened the door to new ideas on statistics of Microsystems that obey the rules of quantum theory, was one of the top ten achievements of 20th century Indian science and could be considered in the Nobel Prize class.

4) Meghnad Saha (Bengali) (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.

In 1911 he ranked third in the ISC exam. In the same year Saha came to Calcutta and joined the Presidency College to study for the B.Sc. degree in Applied Mathematics. Presidency College by then had spawned numerous luminaries, and Saha found himself surrounded by many: Satyendra Nath Bose, Jnan Ghosh, N.R. Sen, and J. N. Mukherjee were his classmates, P.C. Mahalanobis was one year his senior, N. R. Dhar was senior by two years, while Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose was one year his junior. His teachers included Jagadish Chandra Bose in physics, Prafulla Chandra Roy in chemistry, D.N. Mallik and C. E. Cullis in mathematics. After B.Sc. came M.Sc. and once again S.N. Bose was his classmate. In M.Sc. and B.Sc. Saha secured the second rank, while Bose stood first, while in the M.sc. exam both stood first, Bose in Pure Mathematics and Saha in Applied Mathematics.

Saha said "It seems to be the general opinion of the astrophysicists that there is some sort of a repulsive force on the Sun which neutralizes the greater part of gravity. " In a short paper entitled On Radiation-Pressure and the Quantum Theory" contributed in 1919 to the Astrophysical Journal, Saha showed that what countered gravity was selective radiation pressure.

Saha now realized that in order to delve deeply into the matter, he should go to Europe and consult with other eminent astrophysicists to aid him in his research. He got hold of two books on astronomy by Agnes Clerke, which furthered his interest in the subject. But he was short of money, so he had to compete for studentships and fellowships. Among other things, the competition required him to submit a technical essay and he wrote one entitled On the Harvard Classification of Stellar Spectra. Saha's essay was so much superior to the other entries that both the Premchand Roychand Studentship and the Guru Prasanna Ghosh Fellowship easily came to him.With some guarantee for money in pocket, he set sail for Europe in September 1919. After reaching London Saha realized that he was short of money of again, and something had to be done quickly both on the financial side and the scientific as well. Fortunately he ran into an ex-classmate who was then at the Imperial College. He acquainted Saha with Prof.A.Fowler, who himself was a famous stellar astrophysicist and a former assistant to Lockyer. Fowler was impressed by his prize-winning essay and permitted him to work in his lab under his guidance. Under his guidance, Saha rewrote the essay, giving it a new title: On a Physical Theory of Stellar Spectra.Fowler communicated this paper to the Royal Society, which promptly published it in its proceedings; the paper attracted wide attention in America. This thesis won him the Griffith Prize of the Calcutta University in 1920." Saha later reminisced:

I took about four months in rewriting the paper, and all the time I had the advantage of Professor Fowler's criticism, and access to his unrivalled stock of knowledge of spectroscopy and astrophysics. Though the main ideas and working of the paper remained unchanged, the substance matter was greatly improved on account of Fowler's kindness in placing at my disposal fresh data, and offering criticism whenever I went a little astray out of mere enthusiasm.

Commenting on the relationship, astronomer Dingle once observed: "On thinking back to the relation which existed between Saha and Fowler, I am tempted to compare it with that between Maxwell and Faraday." In addition to this paper he also published three other papers on his astrophysical research in the first six months of 1920 in the Philosophical Magazine viz. Ionisation of the Solar Chromosphere (March 4, 1920), On Elements in the Sun (22 May 1920) and On the Problems of Temperature-Radiation of Gases (25 May 1920). In these papers Saha laid the foundation of what later came to be known as the Theory of Thermal Ionisation. The absorption lines of stellar spectra differ widely, with some stars showing virtually nothing but hydrogen and helium lines while others show vast numbers of lines of different metals. Saha's great insight was to see that all these spectral lines could be represented as the result of ionization. He saw that the degree of ionization, i.e., the number of electrons stripped away from the nucleus, would depend primarily on temperature. As the temperature increases, so does the proportion of ionized atoms. The remaining neutral atoms will thus produce only weak absorption lines that, when the temperature gets high enough, will disappear entirely. But the singly, doubly, and even triply ionized atoms will absorb at different sets of wavelengths, and different sets of lines will appear in stellar spectra, becoming stronger as the proportions of these ions grow.He also formulated what is known as the Saha equation. This equation is one of the basic tools for interpretation of the spectra of stars in astrophysics. By studying the spectra of various stars, one can find their temperature and from that, using Saha's equation, determine the ionisation state of the various elements making up the star.

As mentioned earlier, Saha's interest in nuclear physics was aroused during his foreign trip in 1936-37. Impressed particularly by what he saw at Berkeley, he sent in 1938 his student B.D.Nag Chowdhary to Berkeley to study and work under Lawrence, and learn all he could about the cyclotron. Saha was keen to have a cyclotron in the Calcutta University and used his influence with Nehru to persuade the Tatas to give him a grant to build one. The Tatas obliged with Rs. 60,000/- which wasn't however sufficient to construct a cyclotron. In 1941 Nag Chowdhary returned, and thanks to his efforts in America, a consignment of cyclotron parts (mainly for making the magnet) soon followed. Meanwhile America entered the war and the ship carrying the next batch of equipments (mainly vacuum pumps) was sunk by the Japanese. This was major setback, and now there was no hope of getting any parts from America; anyway, American scientists, Lawrence included, had drifted towards the Manhattan Project. The parts now all had to be made in Calcutta, and this proved to be an interminable affair. Eventually it took many years to complete (it started working after Saha passed away). Apart from this Saha also started on a modest scale some cosmic-ray observations in Darjeeling. The event of the atom bomb dropping on Japan made Saha further aware of the profound importance of nuclear energy. So he resolved to establish an autonomous institute under the umbrella of the university devoted exclusively to the study of nuclear science and its prospects. As a result the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics came into being in 1948. It was declared open by Irène Joliot-Curie in 1950. As per the university regulations, Saha had to retire in 1952 both from the Palit Professorship and the post of the Director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics. However he retained links with both the institutes in honorary capacity.

Right from the early thirties Saha was deeply interested in the IACS (Indian Association of Cultivation of Science). In 1944 he became its Honorary Secretary, and following the death of the president in 1946, himself became its president. At that time the IACS was located in Bowbazar. Following the golden era in which Raman conducted his research there, the institute sort of plodded on, and Saha was keen to inject a fresh life into it by starting several new research programmes. all this took time and money, and eventually he persuaded the Government of West Bengal to shift the institute to Jadavpur after buying ten acres of land there. Obeying the Association rules, Saha stepped down as president in 1950. Meanwhile Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar, with whom he had maintained a cordial relation since meeting him in London in 1920, suggested that it was time that the IACS had a full time director. He further insisted that the post be offered to Saha so that he could complete the reorganisation work he had started earlier. Thus in 1953, Saha became the first director of IACS, a post he held till his death in 1956.

"Meghnad Saha's ionization equation (c. 1920), which opened the door to stellar astrophysics" was one of the top ten achievements of 20th century Indian science  could be considered in the Nobel Prize class." - Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

5) Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (Bengali: ) (29 June 1893 – 28 June 1972) was an Indian scientist and applied statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure. He made pioneering studies in anthropometry in India. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute, and contributed to the design of large scale sample surveys.

Mahalanobis received his early schooling at the Brahmo Boys School in Calcutta graduating in 1908. He then joined the Presidency College, Calcutta and received a B.Sc. degree with honours in physics in 1912. He left for England in 1913 to join Cambridge. He however missed a train and stayed with a friend at King's College, Cambridge. He was impressed by the Chapel there and his host's friend M. A. Candeth suggested that he could try joining there, which he did. He did well in his studies, but also took an interest in cross-country walking and punting on the river. He interacted with the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan during the latter's time at Cambridge. After his Tripos in physics, Mahalanobis worked with C. T. R. Wilson at the Cavendish Laboratory. He took a short break and went to India and here he was introduced to the Principal of Presidency College and was invited to take classes in physics.

He went back to England and was introduced to the journal Biometrika. This interested him so much that he bought a complete set and took them to India. He discovered the utility of statistics to problems in meteorology, anthropology and began working on it on his journey back to India.

The Indian Statistical Institute

Many colleagues of Mahalanobis took an interest in statistics and the group grew in the Statistical Laboratory located in his room at the Presidency College, Calcutta. A meeting was called on the 17 December 1931 with Pramatha Nath Banerji (Minto Professor of Economics), Nikhil Ranjan Sen (Khaira Professor of Applied Mathematics) and Sir R. N. Mukherji. The meeting led to the establishment of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), and formally registered on 28 April 1932 as a non-profit distributing learned society under the Societies Registration Act XXI of 1860.

The Institute was initially in the Physics Department of the Presidency College and the expenditure in the first year was Rs. 238. It gradually grew with the pioneering work of a group of his colleagues including S. S. Bose, J. M. Sengupta, R. C. Bose, S. N. Roy, K. R. Nair, R. R. Bahadur, G. Kallianpur, D. B. Lahiri and C. R. Rao. The institute also gained major assistance through Pitamber Pant, who was a secretary to the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Pant was trained in statistics at the Institute and took a keen interest in the institute.

In 1933, the journal Sankhya was founded along the lines of Karl Pearson's Biometrika.

The Institute started a training section in 1938. Many of the early workers left the ISI for careers in the USA and with the government of India. Mahalanobis invited J. B. S. Haldane to join him at the ISI and Haldane joined as a Research Professor from August 1957 and stayed on until February 1961. He resigned from the ISI due to frustrations with the administration and disagreements with Mahalanobis' policies. He was also very concerned with the frequent travels and absence of the director and wrote The journeyings of our Director define a novel random vector. Haldane however helped the ISI grow in biometrics.

In 1959 the Institute was declared as an Institute of national importance and a deemed university.

A chance meeting with Nelson Annandale, then the director of the Zoological Survey of India, at the 1920 Nagpur session of the Indian Science Congress led to a problem in anthropology. Annandale asked him to analyse anthropometric measurements of Anglo-Indians in Calcutta and this led to his first scientific paper in 1922. During the course of these studies he found a way of comparing and grouping populations using a multivariate distance measure. This measure, D2, which is now named after him as Mahalanobis distance, is independent of measurement scale.

Inspired by Biometrika and mentored by Acharya Brajendra Nath Seal he started his statistical work. Initially he worked on analyzing university exam results, anthropometric measurements on Anglo-Indians of Calcutta and some meteorological problems. He also worked as a meteorologist for some time. In 1924, when he was working on the probable error of results of agricultural experiments, he met Ronald Fisher, with whom he established a life-long friendship. He also worked on schemes to prevent floods

6) Gopal Chandra Bhattacharya: (Bengali: ) (11 August 1895 - 8 April 1981) was an Indian entomologist and naturalist known for his pioneering work on social insects and the role of bacteria in metamorphosis. He is the author of bAnglAr kITa-patanga (insects of Bengal), which won the Rabindra Puraskar, Bengal's highest literary award, in 1975.

He is also noted for his work on the popularization of science, especially the three-volume text on hands-on science, kare dekha, lit. kare =do, dekha =see). Over his career, he contributed more than 1000 articles on science to most of the popular Bengali periodicals of the time.

Scientific findings

In 1940, possibly before the fact had been established among naturalists, Gopal Chandra published an article in the Transactions of the Bose Institute of Calcutta, outlining how the queen in social insects such as ants or bees, produces other queens, workers or soldiers, by appropriately altering the nature of the royal jelly fed to the larvae. His observations were based on the Indian variety of ants, Occophylia.He managed to have the ants make nests inside transparent cellophane so that they could be quietly watched, and he noticed how only a special food, certain newly sprouted leaves and buds, induces the formation of queens. This remarkable finding was published in 1940, but the journal was not well circulated abroad during the war years, and it is only now that Gopal Chandra's pioneering work is being recognized.

He was also an early observer of tool use by animals, particularly how hunting wasps use small stone chips for closing nest holes. He also observed how earwigs in the breeding period, grow a muddy ball (like a boxing glove) on its hind legs, which it uses for defending its eggs from predators. If the mud is washed away, the insect promptly places its hind legs into the mud until a new ‘boot’ is formed. This behaviour is not seen outside the breeding season. Since this observation was reported in a Bengali language article in the 1940s, it was not widely known.

Another important observation by Gopal Chandra involves metamorphosis in amphibians. He showed that administering penicillin inhibits certain bacteria in tadpoles, which then fail to mature into frogs. This was against the then prevalent notions that bacteria are always harmful (pathogenic), and Gopal Chandra may have been among the pioneers in demonstrating the existence of salogenic i.e., health giving, bacteria. This pioneering study was later published by his associates in Science and Culture, a Kolkata-based journal.

His magnum opus, bAnglAr kiTa-patanga (1975), which collects these and many other observations, has yet to be translated.

Science popularization

In 1948 he worked with Satyendra Nath Bose (of Bose-Einstein statistics fame) to establish the Bangiya Vigyan Parishad (Bengal Science Council), a society for science research.

Along with friends like Pulin Behari Das, he worked tirelessly for popularization of science. In 1950, he officially became the editor of the Bangiya Vigyan Parishad magazine Jnan o vigyan (lit. jnan=knowledge, vigyan=science), which he had been editing anyhow from behind the scenes. In 1977 he became the chief advisor for the magazine. He was also a member of several groups, including one working on a Bengali encyclopedia, the Bharatkosh. It is estimated that he had published more than a thousand articles on popular science across a wide range of magazines and other media.

He retired from his official job in 1965, but continued to work on insects and writing on popular science.

He won the Ananda Puraskar for Bengali literature in 1968, and the highest award for Bengali literature, the Rabindra Puraskar, in 1975.

Less than three months before he died, this man who never finished college was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Calcutta. In failing health, he died the same

7) C.V.Raman :  Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, FRS (Tamil:) (7 November 1888 – 21 November 1970) was an Indian physicist whose work was influential in the growth of science in the world. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for the discovery that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the light that is deflected changes in wavelength. This phenomenon is now called Raman scattering and is the result of the Raman effect.

Early years

Venkata Raman, a Tamil Brahmin, was born at Thiruvanaikaval, near Tiruchirappalli, Madras Presidency to R. Chandrasekhara Iyer (b. 1866) and Parvati Ammal (Saptarshi Parvati). He was the second of their eight children. At an early age, Raman moved to the city of Vizag, Andhra Pradesh. Studied in St.Aloysius Anglo-Indian High School. His father was a lecturer in Mathematics and physics.

In 1917, Raman resigned from his government service and took up the newly created Palit Professorship in Physics at the University of Calcutta. At the same time, he continued doing research at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Calcutta, where he became the Honorary Secretary. Raman used to refer to this period as the golden era of his career. Many students gathered around him at the IACS and the University of Calcutta.

On February 28, 1928, through his experiments on the scattering of light, he discovered the Raman effect. It was instantly clear that this discovery was an important one. It gave further proof of the quantum nature of light. Raman spectroscopy came to be based on this phenomenon, and Ernest Rutherford referred to it in his presidential address to the Royal Society in 1929. Raman was president of the 16th session of the Indian Science Congress in 1929. He was conferred a knighthood, and medals and honorary doctorates by various universities. Raman was confident of winning the Nobel Prize in Physics as well, and was disappointed when the Nobel Prize went to Richardson in 1928 and to de Broglie in 1929. He was so confident of winning the prize in 1930 that he booked tickets in July, even though the awards were to be announced in November, and would scan each day's newspaper for announcement of the prize, tossing it away if it did not carry the news. He did eventually win the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him". He was the first Asian and first non-White to receive any Nobel Prize in the sciences. Before him Rabindranath Tagore (also Indian) had received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

C.V Raman & Bhagavantam, discovered the quantum photon spin in 1932, which further confirmed the quantum nature of light. 

Raman also worked on the acoustics of musical instruments. He worked out the theory of transverse vibration of bowed strings, on the basis of superposition velocities. He was also the first to investigate the harmonic nature of the sound of the Indian drums such as the tabla and the mridangam.

Raman and his student of mim high school, provided the correct theoretical explanation for the acousto-optic effect (light scattering by sound waves), in a series of articles resulting in the celebrated Raman-Nath theory. Modulators, and switching systems based on this effect have enabled optical communication components based on laser systems.

In 1934, Raman became the assistant director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, where two years later he continued as a professor of physics. Other investigations carried out by Raman were 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.

He also started a company called cv Chemical and Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in 1943 along with Dr. Krishnamurthy. The Company during its 60 year history, established four factories in Southern India. In 1947, he was appointed as the first National Professor by the new government of Independent India.

In 1948, Raman, through studying the spectroscopic behavior of crystals, approached in a new manner fundamental problems of crystal dynamics. He dealt with the structure and properties of diamond, the structure and optical behavior of numerous iridescent substances (labradorite, pearly feldspar, agate, opal, and pearls). Among his other interests were the optics of colloids, electrical and magnetic anisotropy, and the physiology of human vision.

8) Srinivasa Ramanujan: Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanujan (Tamil: ) (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920) was a Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions. Ramanujan's talent was said by the English mathematician G.H. Hardy to be in the same league as legendary mathematicians such as Gauss, Euler, Cauchy, Newton and Archimedes and he is widely regarded as one of the towering geniuses in mathematics.

Born in Erode, Tamil Nadu, India, to a poor Brahmin family, Ramanujan first encountered formal mathematics at age 10. He demonstrated a natural ability, and was given books on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney. He mastered them by age 12, and even discovered theorems of his own, including independently re-discovering Euler's Identity. He demonstrated unusual mathematical skills at school, winning accolades and awards. By 17, Ramanujan conducted his own mathematical research on Bernoulli numbers and the Euler–Mascheroni constant. He received a scholarship to study at Government College in Kumbakonam, but lost it when he failed his non-mathematical coursework. He joined another college to pursue independent mathematical research, working as a clerk in the Accountant-General's office at the Madras Port Trust Office to support himself. In 1912–1913, he sent samples of his theorems to three academics at the University of Cambridge. Only Hardy recognised the brilliance of his work, subsequently inviting Ramanujan to visit and work with him at Cambridge. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, dying of illness, malnutrition and possibly liver infection in 1920 at the age of 32.

During his short lifetime, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3900 results (mostly identities and equations). Although a small number of these results were actually false and some were already known, most of his claims have now been proven correct. He stated results that were both original and highly unconventional, such as the Ramanujan prime and the Ramanujan theta function, and these have inspired a vast amount of further research. However, the mathematical mainstream has been rather slow in absorbing some of his major discoveries. The Ramanujan Journal, an international publication, was launched to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by his work

Mathematical achievements

In mathematics, there is a distinction between having an insight and having a proof. Ramanujan's talent suggested a plethora of formulae that could then be investigated in depth later. It is said that Ramanujan's discoveries are unusually rich and that there is often more to them than initially meets the eye. As a by-product, new directions of research were opened up. Examples of the most interesting of these formulae include the intriguing infinite series for π, one of which is given below

This result is based on the negative fundamental discriminant d = −4×58 with class number h(d) = 2 (note that 5×7×13×58 = 26390 and that 9801=99×99; 396=4×99) and is related to the fact that

Compare to Heegner numbers, which have class number 1 and yield similar formulae. Ramanujan's series for π converges extraordinarily rapidly (exponentially) and forms the basis of some of the fastest algorithms currently used to calculate π. Truncating the sum to the first term also gives the approximation  for π, which is correct to six decimal places.

One of his remarkable capabilities was the rapid solution for problems. He was sharing a room with P. C. Mahalanobis who had a problem, "Imagine that you are on a street with houses marked 1 through n. There is a house in between (x) such that the sum of the house numbers to left of it equals the sum of the house numbers to its right. If n is between 50 and 500, what are n and x?" This is a bivariate problem with multiple solutions. Ramanujan thought about it and gave the answer with a twist: He gave a continued fraction. The unusual part was that it was the solution to the whole class of problems. Mahalanobis was astounded and asked how he did it. "It is simple. The minute I heard the problem, I knew that the answer was a continued fraction. Which continued fraction, I asked myself. Then the answer came to my mind", Ramanujan replied.

His intuition also led him to derive some previously unknown identities, such as

for all θ, where Γ(z) is the gamma function. Expanding into series of powers and equating coefficients of θ0, θ4, and θ8 gives some deep identities for the hyperbolic secant.

In 1918, Hardy and Ramanujan studied the partition function P(n) extensively and gave a non-convergent asymptotic series that permits exact computation of the number of partitions of an integer. Hans Rademacher, in 1937, was able to refine their formula to find an exact convergent series solution to this problem. Ramanujan and Hardy's work in this area gave rise to a powerful new method for finding asymptotic formulae, called the circle method.

He discovered mock theta functions in the last year of his life. For many years these functions were a mystery, but they are now known to be the holomorphic parts of harmonic weak Maass forms.

 The Ramanujan conjecture

Main article: Ramanujan–Petersson conjecture

Although there are numerous statements that could bear the name Ramanujan conjecture, there is one statement that was very influential on later work. In particular, the connection of this conjecture with conjectures of André Weil in algebraic geometry opened up new areas of research. That Ramanujan conjecture is an assertion on the size of the tau function, which has as generating function the discriminant modular form Δ(q), a typical cusp form in the theory of modular forms. It was finally proven in 1973, as a consequence of Pierre Deligne's proof of the Weil conjectures. The reduction step involved is complicated. Deligne won a Fields Medal in 1978 for his work on Weil conjectures.

 Ramanujan's notebooks

Further information: Ramanujan's lost notebook

While still in India, Ramanujan recorded the bulk of his results in four notebooks of loose leaf paper. These results were mostly written up without any derivations. This is probably the origin of the misperception that Ramanujan was unable to prove his results and simply thought up the final result directly. Mathematician Bruce C. Berndt, in his review of these notebooks and Ramanujan's work, says that Ramanujan most certainly was able to make the proofs of most of his results, but chose not to.

This style of working may have been for several reasons. Since paper was very expensive, Ramanujan would do most of his work and perhaps his proofs on slate, and then transfer just the results to paper. Using a slate was common for mathematics students in India at the time. He was also quite likely to have been influenced by the style of G. S. Carr's book, which stated results without proofs. Finally, it is possible that Ramanujan considered his workings to be for his personal interest alone; and therefore only recorded the results.

The first notebook has 351 pages with 16 somewhat organized chapters and some unorganized material. The second notebook has 256 pages in 21 chapters and 100 unorganised pages, with the third notebook containing 33 unorganised pages. The results in his notebooks inspired numerous papers by later mathematicians trying to prove what he had found. Hardy himself created papers exploring material from Ramanujan's work as did G. N. Watson, B. M. Wilson, and Bruce Berndt. A fourth notebook with 87 unorganised pages, the so-called "lost notebook", was rediscovered in 1976 by George Andrews.

 Ramanujan–Hardy number 1729

Main article: 1729 (number)

A common anecdote about Ramanujan relates to the number 1729. Hardy arrived at Ramanujan's residence in a cab numbered 1729. Hardy commented that the number 1729 seemed to be uninteresting. Ramanujan is said to have stated on the spot that it was actually a very interesting number mathematically, being the smallest natural number representable in two different ways as a sum of two cubes:

Generalizations of this idea have created the notion of "taxicab numbers". Coincidentally, 1729 is also a Carmichael Number.

 Other mathematicians' views of Ramanujan

Hardy said : "The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems... to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was... beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy's theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was...". When asked about the methods employed by Ramanujan to arrive at his solutions, Hardy said that they were "arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account."He also stated that he had "never met his equal, and can compare him only with Euler or Jacobi."

Quoting K. Srinivasa Rao, "As for his place in the world of Mathematics, we quote Bruce C. Berndt: 'Paul Erdős has passed on to us Hardy's personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100, Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J.E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.'"

In his book Scientific Edge, noted physicist Jayant Narlikar spoke of "Srinivasa Ramanujan, discovered by the Cambridge mathematician Hardy, whose great mathematical findings were beginning to be appreciated from 1915 to 1919. His achievements were to be fully understood much later, well after his untimely death in 1920. For example, his work on the highly composite numbers (numbers with a large number of factors) started a whole new line of investigations in the theory of such numbers."

During his lifelong mission in educating and propagating mathematics among the school children in India, Nigeria and elsewhere, P.K. Srinivasan has continually introduced Ramanujan's mathematical works.

9) Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Early Life and Education:

Chandrasekhar was born in Lahore, Punjab, British India (now Pakistan) to Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Iyer (1885–1960) and his wife, Sitalakshmi (1891–1931).[5] He was the eldest of their four sons and the third of their ten children. The name Chandrasekhar is one of the appellations of Shiva, meaning "holder of the moon" in Sanskrit. His paternal uncle was the Indian physicist and Nobel laureate C. V. Raman. C. S. Iyer was posted in Lahore as the Deputy Auditor General of the Northwestern Railways at the time of Chandrasekhar's birth. His mother tongue was Tamil. Chandra's father was also an accomplished Carnatic music violinist who had authored several books on musicology. His mother was devoted to intellectual pursuits and had translated Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House into Tamil. She is credited with arousing Chandra's intellectual curiosity early on.

Subsequent career:

In January 1937, Chandrasekhar was recruited to the University of Chicago faculty as Assistant Professor by Dr. Otto Struve and President Robert Maynard Hutchins. He was to remain at the university for his entire career, becoming Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics in 1952 and attaining emeritus status in 1985. Famously, Chandrasekhar declined many offers from other universities, including one to succeed Henry Norris Russell, the preeminent American astronomer, as director of the Princeton University Observatory.

Chandrasekhar did some work at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, which was run by the University of Chicago. After the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research (LASR) was built by NASA in 1966 at the University, Chandrasekhar occupied one of the four corner offices on the second floor. (The other corners housed John A. Simpson, Peter Meyer, and Eugene N. Parker.) Chandrasekhar lived at 4800 Lake Shore Drive, about a mile from the University, after the high-rise apartment complex was built in the late 1960s.

During World War II, Chandrasekhar worked at the Ballistic Research Laboratories at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. While there, he worked on problems of ballistics; for example, two reports from 1943 were titled, On the decay of plane shock waves and The normal reflection of a blast wave.

Chandrasekhar developed a style of working continuously in one specific area of physics for a number of years; consequently, his working life can be divided into distinct periods. He studied stellar structure, including the theory of white dwarfs, during the years 1929 to 1939, and subsequently focused on stellar dynamics from 1939 to 1943. Next, he concentrated on the theory of radiative transfer and the quantum theory of the negative ion of hydrogen from 1943 to 1950. This was followed by sustained work on hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability from 1950 to 1961. In the 1960s, he studied the equilibrium and the stability of ellipsoidal figures of equilibrium, and also general relativity. During the period, 1971 to 1983 he studied the mathematical theory of black holes, and, finally, during the late 80s, he worked on the theory of colliding gravitational waves.

Chandra worked closely with his students and expressed pride in the fact that over a 50 year period (from roughly 1930 to 1980), the average age of his co-author collaborators had remained the same, at around 30. He insisted that students address him as "Chandrasekhar" until they received their Ph.D. degree, after which time they (as other colleagues) were encouraged to address him as "Chandra".

From 1952 to 1971 Chandrasekhar was editor of the Astrophysical Journal.

During the years 1990 to 1995, Chandrasekhar worked on a project devoted to explaining the detailed geometric arguments in Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica using the language and methods of ordinary calculus. The effort resulted in the book Newton's Principia for the Common Reader, published in 1995. Chandrasekhar was an honorary member of the International Academy of Science.

Chandrasekhar died of heart failure in Chicago in 1995, and was survived by his wife, Lalitha Chandrasekhar. In the Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society of London, R. J. Tayler wrote: "Chandrasekhar was a classical applied mathematician whose research was primarily applied in astronomy and whose like will probably never be seen again."

 Nobel prize:

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his studies on the physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars. Chandrasekhar accepted this honor, but was upset that the citation mentioned only his earliest work, seeing it as a denigration of a lifetime's achievement. He shared it with William A. Fowler

10) Homi Bhabha

Homi Jehangir Bhabha, FRS (30 October 1909 – 24 January 1966) was an Indian nuclear physicist and the chief architect of the Indian atomic energy program. He was also responsible for the establishment of two well-known research institutions, namely the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and the Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay (which after Bhabha's death was renamed as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC)). As a scientist, he is remembered for deriving a correct expression for the probability of scattering positrons by electrons, a process now known as Bhabha scattering. For his significant contributions to the development of atomic energy in India, he is known as the father of India's nuclear program. World War II broke out in September 1939 while Bhabha was vacationing in India. He chose to remain in India until the war ended. In the meantime, he accepted a position at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, headed by Nobel laureate C. V. Raman. He established the Cosmic Ray Research Unit at the institute, and began to work on the theory of the movement of point particles. In 1945, he established the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, and the Atomic Energy Commission of India three years later. In the 1950s, Bhabha represented India in International Atomic Energy Forums, and served as President of the United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva, Switzerland in 1955. He was awarded Padma Bhushan by Government of India in 1954. He later served as the member of the Indian Cabinet's Scientific Advisory Committee and set up the Indian National Committee for Space Research with Vikram Sarabhai. In January 1966, Bhabha died in a plane crash near Mont Blanc, while heading to Vienna, Austria to attend a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Scientific Advisory Committee.

11) Vikram Sarabhai:

Early years and education

Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai was born on 12 August 1919 in the city of Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat in western India. The Sarabhai family was an important and rich Jain business family. His father Ambalal Sarabhai was an affluent industrialist and owned many mills including some textile mills in Gujarat. Vikram Sarabhai was one of the eight children of Ambalal and Sarla Devi.

To educate her eight children, Sarla Devi established a private school on the lines of the Montessori method which was gaining fame at the time. Since the Sarabhai family was involved in the Indian freedom struggle, many leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru used to frequent the Sarabhai house.

Sarabhai matriculated from Gujarat College in Ahmedabad after passing the Intermediate Science examination. After that he moved to England and joined St. John's College, University of Cambridge. He received the Tripos in Natural Sciences from Cambridge in 1940. With the escalation of the Second World War, Sarabhai returned to India and joined the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and began research in cosmic rays under the guidance of Nobel Laureate C. V. Raman. He returned to Cambridge after the war in 1945 and was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1947, for his thesis titled Cosmic Ray Investigation in Tropical Latitudes.

Indian space programme:

The establishment of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) was one of his greatest achievements. He successfully convinced the government of the importance of a space programme for a developing country like India after the Russian Sputnik launch. Dr. Sarabhai emphasized the importance of a space programme in his quote:

"There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation. To us, there is no ambiguity of purpose. We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight."

"But we are convinced that if we are to play a meaningful role nationally, and in the community of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and society."

Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha, widely regarded as the father of India's nuclear science program, supported Dr. Sarabhai in setting up the first rocket launching station in India. This center was established at Thumba near Thiruvananthapuram on the coast of the Arabian Sea, primarily because of its proximity to the equator. After a remarkable effort in setting up the infrastructure, personnel, communication links, and launch pads, the inaugural flight was launched on November 21, 1963 with a sodium vapour payload.

As a result of Dr. Sarabhai's dialogue with NASA in 1966, the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) was launched during July 1975 – July 1976 (when Dr.Sarabhai was no more).

Dr. 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.

Dr. Sarabhai was very interested in science education and founded a Community Science Centre at Ahmedabad in 1966. Today, the centre is called the Vikram A Sarabhai Community Science Centre.

He led the family's 'Sarabhai' diversified business group.

His interests varied from science to sports to statistics. He set up Operations Research Group (ORG), the first market research organization in the country.

Sarabhai established many institutes which are of international repute. Most notable among them are Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) which are considered world class for their management studies. Also he helped establish Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), which is doing commendable job in R&D in physics. Sarabhai set up Ahmedabad Textiles Industrial Research Association (ATIRA), which helped the booming textiles business in Ahmedabad. He also set up Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT). Not stopping with all these he went ahead and set up Blind Men Association (BMA) which helps visually challenged people with necessary skills and support.

12) Har Gobind Khorana

Early life, education, and career

Khorana was born to Sikh parents in Raipur, British India (now in Pakistan). His father was the village "patwari" (or taxation official). He was named after the sixth Guru of the Sikhs - Guru Hargobind ji. He was home schooled by his father until high school. He earned his B.Sc from Punjab University, Lahore in 1943, and his M.Sc from Punjab University in 1945. In 1945, he began studying at the University of Liverpool. After earning a Ph.D in 1948, he continued his postdoctoral studies in Zürich (1948–1949). Subsequently, he spent two years at Cambridge University. In 1952 he went to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and in 1960 moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1970 Khorana became the Alfred Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked until retiring in 2007.

Khorana's research relevant to his Nobel Prize

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) with two repeating units (UCUCUCU → UCU CUC UCU) produced two alternating amino acids. This, combined with the Nirenberg and Leder experiment, showed that UCU codes for Serine and CUC codes for Leucine. RNAs with three repeating units (UACUACUA → UAC UAC UAC, or ACU ACU ACU, or CUA CUA CUA) produced three different strings of amino acids. RNAs with four repeating units including UAG, UAA, or UGA, produced only dipeptides and tripeptides thus revealing that UAG, UAA and UGA are stop codons.

With this, Khorana and his team had established that the mother of all codes, 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. Their Nobel lecture was delivered on December 12, 1968.Khorana was the first scientist to synthesize oligonucleotides.

Subsequent research

He extended the above to long DNA Polymers using non-aqueous chemistry and assembled these into the first synthetic gene, using polymerase and ligase enzymes that link pieces of DNA together.as well as methods that anticipated the invention of PCR.These custom-designed pieces of artificial genes are widely used in biology labs for sequencing, cloning and engineering new plants and animals. This invention of Khorana has become automated and commercialized so that anyone now can order a synthetic gene from any of a number of companies. One merely needs to send the genetic sequence to one of the companies to receive an oligonucleotide with the desired sequence.

His lab has since mid 1970s studied the biochemistry of the membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin responsible for converting photon energy into proton gradient energy and most recently studying the structural related visual pigment rhodopsin.

Khorana died of natural causes on November 9, 2011 in Concord, Massachusetts, aged 89.A widower, he was survived by his children Julia and Dave.

13) Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam

Abdul Kalam, is a renowned aerospace engineer, professor (of Aerospace engineering), and first chancellor of the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology Thiruvananthapuram (IIST), who served as the 11th President of India from 2002 to 2007. During his term as President, he was popularly known as the People's President. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor in 1997.

Before his term as India's president, he worked as an aeronautical engineer with DRDO and ISRO. He is popularly known as the Missile Man of India for his work on development of ballistic missile and space rocket technology. Kalam played a pivotal organizational, technical and political role in India's Pokhran-II nuclear test in 1998, the first since the original nuclear test by India in 1974. Dr. Kalam has even been circled with various controversies as many scientific experts called him a man with no authority over "nuclear physics" and a man who just carried the works of Dr. Homi Bhabha and Dr. Vikram Sarabhai.

He is currently the a visiting professor at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad,chancellor of Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology Thiruvananthapuram, a professor at Anna University (Chennai), a visiting professor at Indian Institute of Management Indore, and an adjunct/visiting faculty at many other academic and research institutions across India.

In May 2011, Dr. Kalam launched his mission for the youth of the nation called the What Can I Give Movement.Dr. Kalam better known as a scientist, also has special interest in the field of arts like writing Tamil poems, and also playing the music instrument Veena.

Early life and education

Abdul Kalam was born in Rameshwaram, presently Tamil Nadu, in India in 1931. He spent most of his childhood in financial problems and started working at an early age to supplement his family's income.

After completing his school education, Kalam graduated in physics from St. Joseph's College, Tiruchirappalli. He then graduated with a diploma in Aeronautical Engineering in the mid-1950s from the Madras Institute of Technology. As the Project Director, he was heavily involved in the development of India's first indigenous Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-II).

Career

After graduation from Madras Institute of Technology (MIT - Chennai) he was the Project Director, he was heavily involved in the development of India's first indigenous Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-III). As Chief Executive of the Integrated Guided Missile Development Program (I.G.M.D.P), he played a major part in developing many missiles in India including Agni and Prithvi although the entire project has been criticised for being overrun and mismanaged. He was the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Prime Minister and the Secretary of Defence Research and Development Organisation from July 1992 to December 1999. Pokhran-II nuclear tests were conducted during this period and have been associated with Kalam although he was not directly involved with the nuclear program at the time.

Future India: 2020

In his book India 2020, Kalam strongly advocates an action plan to develop India into a knowledge superpower and a developed nation by the year 2020. He regards his work on India's nuclear weapons program as a way to assert India's place as a future superpower.

It has been reported that there is a considerable demand in South Korea for translated versions of books authored by him.

Kalam continues to take an active interest in other developments in the field of science and technology. He has proposed a research program for developing bio-implants. He is a supporter of Open Source over proprietary solutions and believes that the use of free software on a large scale will bring the benefits of information technology to more people

14) Jayant Vishnu Narlikar

Early life

Narlikar was born in Kolhapur, India on July 19, 1938. His father, Vishnu Vasudev Narlikar, was a mathematician who served as a professor and later as the Head of the Department of Mathematics at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Jayant's mother, Sumati Narlikar, was a scholar of Sanskrit language. He studied in Kendriya Vidyalaya Banaras(till class 12) and Banaras Hindu University(12th Onwards) campus, Varanasi.

Career

Narlikar received his Bachelor of Science degree from Banaras Hindu University in 1957 and a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1960, winning the Tyson Medal. During his doctoral studies at Cambridge, he won Smith’s Prize in 1962. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1963 under the guidance of Fred Hoyle, he served as a Berry Ramsey Fellow at King's College in Cambridge and earned an M.A. in astronomy and astrophysics in 1964. He continued to work as a Fellow at King's College until 1972. In 1966, Fred Hoyle established the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge, and Narlikar served as the founder staff member of the institute during 1966-72.

In 1972, Narlikar took up Professorship at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, India. At the TIFR, he was in charge of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group. In 1988, the Indian University Grants Commission set up the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, and Narlikar became the Founder-Director of IUCAA.

Narlikar is internationally known for his work in cosmology, especially in championing models alternative to the popular Big Bang model. During 1994-1997, he was the President of the Cosmology Commission of the International Astronomical Union. His research work has involved Mach’s Principle, quantum cosmology, and action-at-a-distance physics.

During 1999-2003, Narlikar headed an international team in a pioneering experiment designed to sample air for microorganisms in the atmosphere at heights of up to 41 km. Biological studies of the collected samples led to the findings of live cells and bacteria, which introduced the possibility that the earth is being bombarded by microorganisms, some of which might have seeded life itself on earth.

Narlikar was also appointed the Chairperson, Advisory Group for Textbooks in Science and Mathematics, the textbook development committee responsible for developing textbooks in Science and Mathematics, published by NCERT, which are used widely as standard textbooks in many Indian schools

15) Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty

Education and home life

Ananda (generally called "Al" by scientific colleagues) Chakrabarty was born in India on 4 April 1938. He attended Sainthia High School, Belur Bidyamandir and St. Xavier's College, Calcutta in that order during the course of his undergraduate education. Prof. Chakrabarty received his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta in Kolkata, West Bengal in 1965.

Early scientific work

Prof. Chakrabarty genetically engineered a new species of Pseudomonas bacteria ("the oil-eating bacteria") in 1971 while working for the Research & Development Center at General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York.

At the time, four known species of oil-metabolizing bacteria were known to exist, but when introduced into an oil spill, competed with each other, limiting the amount of crude oil that they degraded. The genes necessary to degrade oil were carried on plasmids, which could be transferred among species. By irradiating the transformed organism with UV light after plasmid transfer, Prof. Chakrabarty discovered a method for genetic cross-linking that fixed all four plasmid genes in place and produced a new, stable, bacteria species (now called pseudomonas putida) capable of consuming oil one or two orders of magnitude faster than the previous four strains of oil-eating microbes. The new microbe, which Chakrabarty called "multi-plasmid hydrocarbon-degrading Pseudomonas," could digest about two-thirds of the hydrocarbons that would be found in a typical oil spill.

The bacteria drew international attention when he applied for a patent—the first-ever patent for living organism.He was initially denied the patent by the Patent Office because it was thought that the patent code precluded patents on living organisms. The United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals overturned the decision in Chakrabarty's favor, writing,

“          ...the fact that micro-organisms are alive is without legal significance for purposes of patent law. ”

Sidney A. Diamond, Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, then appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court case was argued on 17 March 1980 and decided on 16 June 1980. This patent was granted by the U.S. Supreme Court (Diamond v. Chakrabarty), in a 5-4 decision, when it determined that

“          A live, human-made micro-organism is patentable subject matter under 101. Respondent's micro-organism constitutes a "manufacture" or "composition of matter" within that statute.      ”

Prof. Chakrabarty's landmark research has since paved the way for many patents on genetically modified micro-organisms and other life forms, and catapulted him into the international spotlight.

 Current work

Currently, his lab is working on elucidating the role of bacterial cupredoxins and cytochromes in cancer regression and arresting cell cycle progression.These proteins have been formerly known for their involvement in bacterial electron transport. He has isolated a bacterial protein, azurin, with potential antineoplastic properties. He has expanded his lab's work to include multiple microbiological species, including Neisseria, Plasmodia, and Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans. In 2001, Prof. Chakrabarty founded a company, CDG Therapeutics, (incorporated in Delaware) which holds proprietary information related to five patents generated by his work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The University of Illinois owns the rights to the patents but has issued exclusive licences to CDG Therapeutics.

In 2008, Prof. Chakrabarty co-founded a second bio-pharmaceutical discovery company, Amrita Therapeutics Ltd., registered in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, to develop therapies, vaccines and diagnostics effective against cancers and/or other major public health threats derived from bacterial products found in the human body. Amrita Therapeutics Ltd. received initial funding in late 2008 from GVFL, and more recently received a grant for a 2-year research program in 2010 from the Indian Department of Biotechnology under the Biotechnology Industry Promotion Program (BIPP).

16) Subhash Mukhopadhyay

 Early life

He was born on January 16, 1931 in Hazaribag, Bihar (now in jharkhand), India. He studied and graduated (in 1955) with an honours degree in physiology from the Calcutta National Medical College, which was then affiliated with the prestigious University of Calcutta.He would later earn a doctorate from the University of Calcutta in 1958 reproductive physiology under the stewardship of Prof. Sachchidananda Banerjee. Later he would earn a second doctorate from the University of Edinburgh in 1967 in reproductive endocrinology,

His life and death has been the subject of countless newspaper reviews and inspired the Hindi movie Ek Doctor Ki Maut (Death of a doctor), directed by Tapan Sinha.

Career

He created history when he became the first physician in India (and second in the world after British physicians Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards) to perform the In vitro fertilization resulting in a test tube baby "Durga" (alias Kanupriya Agarwal) on October 3, 1978.

Facing social ostracization, bureaucratic negligence, reprimand and insult instead of recognition from the West Bengal government  and refusal of the Government of India to allow him to attend international conferences he committed suicide in his Calcutta residence on 19 June 1981.

His feat has been given belated recognition as the Indian physician who in 1986 was "officially" regarded as being the first doctor to perform in-vitro fertilization in India.

His recognition is attributable to TC Anand Kumar who is credited to be the mastermind behind India's second (officially the first) test-tube baby. Kumar took the crown off his own head after reviewing Subhash Mukhopadhyay's personal notes. He was ably helped by Sunit Mukherji, who was a one-time colleague of Mukhopadhyay.

Kumar is currently active in setting up a research institute in reproductive biology in memory of Mukhopadhyay.

In vitro culture techniques

The freshly aspirated oocytes were incubated for 4 hours before inseminating them with the husband’s semen that was processed in protein-supplemented Tyrode's solution. This is exactly what is done even to this day in almost all IVF programmes to accomplish in vitro oocyte maturation; processing semen is essential for ‘sperm activation’. The oocytes were exposed to processed semen for a period of 24 hours and later incubated for another 72 hours in a mixture of cervical-uterine fluids. The use of such fluid is not described elsewhere. However, the use of a synthetic fluid, similar to that found in the human Fallopian tube, has been described to be useful for in vitro embryo culture procedures.

The methods of in vitro fertilization and embryo growth are described in detail in Mukherjee ’s letter to the DHS dated 19 October 1978 as well as in a publication in an obscure journal. Mukherjee ’s stated ‘…It also appears that for cryogenic preservation of embryos with a relatively larger number of blastomeres (more than 8 cells) may be preferable’.

‘Few pre-ovulatory human oocytes collected from a married woman by surgery were fertilized with spermatozoa from the husband and cleaved in vitro and subsequently frozen slowly to about 196oC after stepwise treatment with dimethyl sulfoxide. One such frozen embryo was subsequently thawed slowly and when transferred into the uterus of the woman apparently resulted in the production of a clinically normal female baby after normal period of gestation’.

Here is clear published evidence of how exactly Mukherjee carried out his version of in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer.

Cryopreservation of embryos from mice, rabbits, sheep and goats were reported between 1971 and 1979. The first report on the successful cryopreservation of four to eight cell human embryos appeared as late as 1981 and Trounson and Mohr reported the first successful clinical outcome of the transfer of thawed human embryos in 1983. A WHO report states ‘embryo cryopreservation has now become a routine adjunct to IVF procedures, and various methods of freezing are employed. The method that has yielded the best results in terms of simplicity, efficiency and reproducibility is one that involves freezing of one to three-day-old embryos (one to eight cells) in a controlled biological chamber that cools the embryos to sub-zero temperatures in the presence of a cryoprotectant 1,2 propanediol. Other cryoprotectants that are used are dimethyl sulfoxide (the same cryoprotectant was used by Mukherjee ) and glycerol.

It may be noted that Subhas Mukherjee reported the successful cryopreservation of an eight cell embryo, storing it for 53 days, thawing and replacing it into the mother’s womb, resulting in a successful and live birth as early as 1978- a full five years before anyone else had done so. This small publication of Mukherjee in 1978 clearly shows that Mukherjee was on the right line of thinking much before anyone else had demonstrated the successful outcome of a pregnancy following the transfer of a 8-cell frozen-thawed embryo into human subjects transferring 8-cell cryopreserved embryos.”

17) Dr. Sankar Chatterjee

Dr. Chatterjee's work has focused on the origin, evolution, functional anatomy, and systematics of Mesozoic vertebrates, particularly basal archosaurs, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and birds.  He has done important work on poorly known Late Triassic reptiles in India, including phytosaurs, rhynchosaurs, and prolacertiforms, but he is best known for his work on vertebrates recovered in the 1980s from the Post Quarry in the Late Triassic Cooper Canyon Formation (Dockum Group) of West Texas.  This material includes the large rauisuchian Postosuchus (named for the nearby town of Post), and controversial specimens Chatterjee identified as being avian (Protoavis).  The recognition of these specimens as avian pushes back the origin of birds at least 75 million years.

Dr. Chatterjee continues to participate in Dockum vertebrate paleontology, and takes an active interest in the fieldwork and research being conducted by his students and other workers at Texas Tech.  In recent years, his interests have focused on flying archosaurs.  He has worked on the biomechanics of flight in birds and pterosaurs and cranial kinesis in birds, and has also delved into ontogenetic and evolutionary issues relating to heterochrony in birds.  Dr. Chatterjee is also involved with explorations into the neuroanatomy of these archosaurs.  Larger scale interests involve plate tectonics (his original specialty) and paleobiogeography.  Recently, Dr. Chatterjee proposed the Shiva structure in India as an impact crater of the asteroid that caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction.

18) Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Early life

Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India[4] to C. V. Ramakrishnan and Rajalakshmi. Both his parents were scientists and taught biochemistry at the Maharaj Sayajirao University in Baroda.[5] He moved toVadodara in Gujarat at the age of three, where he had his schooling at Convent of Jesus and Mary, except for spending 1960–61 in Adelaide, Australia. Following his Pre-Science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he did his undergraduate studies in the same university on a National Science Talent Scholarship, graduating with a B.Sc. in Physics in 1971.

In a January 2010 lecture at the Indian Institute of Science, he revealed that he failed to get admitted at any of the Indian Institutes of Technology, or Christian Medical College, Vellore, Tamil Nadu.

Immediately after graduation he moved to the U.S.A., where he obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from Ohio University in 1976. He then spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology.

Career

Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Moore at Yale University. After his post-doctoral fellowship, he initially could not find a faculty position even though he had applied to about 50 universities in the U.S.

He continued to work on ribosomes from 1983-95 as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1995 he moved to the University of Utah as a Professor of Biochemistry, and in 1999, he moved to his current position at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he had also been a sabbatical visitor during 1991-2.

In 1999, Ramakrishnan's laboratory published a 5.5 Angstrom resolution structure of the 30S subunit. The following year, his laboratory determined the complete molecular structure of the 30S subunit of the ribosome and its complexes with several antibiotics. This was followed by studies that provided structural insights into the mechanism that ensures the fidelity of protein biosynthesis. More recently, his laboratory has determined the atomic structure of the whole ribosome in complex with its tRNA and mRNA ligands. Ramakrishnan is also known for his past work on histone and chromatin structure.

 Honors

Ramakrishnan is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of EMBO and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was awarded the 2007 Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the 2008 Heatley Medal of the British Biochemical Society and the 2009 Rolf-Sammet Professorship at the University of Frankfurt. In 2009, Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath. He received India's second highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2010.

19) Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

Early life and education

Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran (in accordance with Indian family name traditions, his family name, Vilayanur, is placed first) was born in 1951 in Tamil Nadu, India. In Tamil, one of the classical languages of India, his name is written as. His father, Vilayanur Subramanian, was a UN diplomat, and as a consequence, Ramachandran spent much of his youth moving among several different posts in India and other parts of Asia. As a young man he attended schools in Madras, Bangkok and England, and pursued many scientific interests, including conchology.Ramachandran obtained an M.B.B.S. from Stanley Medical College in Madras, India, and subsequently obtained a Ph.D. from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. While a graduate student at Cambridge Ramachandran also collaborated on research projects with faculty at Oxford, including David Whitteridge of the Physiology Department. He then spent two years at Caltech, as a research fellow working with Jack Pettigrew. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego in 1983, and has been a full professor there since 1998.

Ramachandran is the grandson of Sir Alladi Krishnaswamy Iyer, Advocate General of Madras and co-architect of the Constitution of India. He is married to Diane Rogers-Ramachandran and they have two boys, Mani and Jaya.

Scientific career

Ramachandran has studied neurological syndromes to investigate neural mechanisms underlying human mental function. Ramachandran is best known for his work on syndromes such as phantom limbs, body integrity identity disorder, and Capgras delusion. His research has also contributed to the understanding of synesthesia. More recently his work has focused on the theoretical implications of mirror neurons and the cause of autism. In addition, Ramachandran is known for the invention of the mirror box. He has published over 180 papers in scientific journals. Twenty of these have appeared in Nature, and others have appeared in Science, Nature Neuroscience, Perception and Vision Research. Ramachandran is a member of the editorial board of Medical Hypotheses (Elsevier) and has published 15 articles there.

Ramachandran's work in behavioral neurology has been widely reported by the media. He has appeared in numerous Channel 4 and PBS documentaries. He has also been featured by the BBC, the Science Channel, Newsweek, Radio Lab, and This American Life, TED Talks, and Charlie Rose. In the episode "The Tyrant" of the television show House, M.D., Dr. House cures phantom limb pain using a mirror box.

He is author of Phantoms in the Brain which formed the basis for a two part series on BBC Channel 4 TV (UK) and a 1-hour PBS special in the USA. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of the Human Brain (2002), and is co-author of the bi-monthly "Illusions" column in Scientific American Mind.

Ramachandran has recently lamented that science has become too professionalized. In a 2010 interview with the British Neuroscience Association he stated: "But where I'd really like to go is back in time. I'd go to the Victorian age, before science had professionalized and become just another 9–5 job, with power-brokering and grants nightmares. Back then scientists just had fun. People like Darwin and Huxley; the whole world was their playground.

Phantom limbs

When an arm or leg is amputated, patients continue to feel vividly the presence of the missing limb as a "phantom limb". Building on earlier work by Ronald Melzack (McGill University) and Timothy Pons (NIMH), Ramachandran theorized that there was a link between the phenomenon of phantom limbs and neural plasticity in the adult human brain. In particular, he theorized that the body image maps in the somatosensory cortex are re-mapped after the amputation of a limb. In 1993, working with T.T. Yang who was conducting MEG research at the Scripps Research Institute, Ramachandran demonstrated that there had been measurable changes in the somatosensory cortex of several patients who had undergone arm amputations. Ramachandran theorized that there was a relationship between cortical reorganization in the brain and the referred sensations he observed in his subjects. He presented this theory in a paper titled "Perceptual correlates of massive cortical reorganization." However, in 1996 Knecht et al., using magnetic source imaging, demonstrated that there was no relationship between cortical reorganization and a particular pattern of referred sensation after amputation.In 1998 Ramachandran and Hirstein published a review of research on phantom limbs that proposed a five factor model of phantom limb sensations and experience.

20) Ashoke Sen

Ashoke Sen (Bengali: অশোক সেন), FRS, (born 1956) is an Indian theoretical physicist. He has made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality, which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensation on such branes. His description of rolling tachyons has been influential in string cosmology. He has also co-authored many important papers on string field theory. One of his most recent contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors. His current research interests are centered around the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates for black holes in string theory. Of his nearly 200 research papers, as many as 47 papers have over 100 citations each.

Sen, now above 50, received his bachelor’s of science degree in 1975 from Calcutta University, and his master’s three years later from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He did his doctoral work in physics at Stony Brook University, where he graduated in 1982, subsequently spending the next three years as a post-doc at Fermilab and another two and a half at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). In March 1988, he moved back to India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Since 1995 he has been a full professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute. Between 1998 and 2003, Sen visited the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, U.K., as Rothschild Visiting Professor, and, between 2004 and 2005, was at MIT as Morningstar Visiting Professor. He is married to Dr. Sumathi Rao, a condensed matter physicist at HRI.


Those Were The Top Most Scientists from Modern India who have planted their firm believe and discovery to every fields of Science Throughout the World. Future of The Science will be formed or take into shape on the shoulder of their discovery and inventions . 

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