Science has long been an essential aspect of India, and it is now one of the country’s fastest expanding industries, thanks to the contributions of numerous Indian scientists. Even Albert Einstein, the famed scientist, stated, “We owe a lot to the ancient Indians for teaching us how to count. Most recent scientific discoveries would have been impossible without it “. Indians have made major contributions to science that have transformed the world. Here are the top ten scientists in India:
Dr C.V. Raman (Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman) was born on November 7, 1888, in Tiruchirapalli and was the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize in Science. Raman was a well-known Indian scientist who made significant contributions to the field of physics.
Raman discovered that when some deflected light travels through a transparent medium, its wavelength changes. The Raman effect causes this phenomenon, which is also known as Raman scattering. Raman won the Nobel prize in 1930 for this discovery. Raman was also interested in the acoustics of musical instruments. He was the first to look into the harmonic properties of tabla and mridangam drum sounds.
Dr. C.V. Raman was the first independent national professor in India and director of the Indian Institute of Science.
Homi Jehangir Bhabha, born on October 30, 1909, in Bombay, was an Indian physicist who is widely regarded as the founder of India’s nuclear programme.
Bhabha received his PhD in nuclear physics in 1934, and after completing his professional career in nuclear physics in the United Kingdom, he returned to his country, India. He was instrumental in persuading Jawaharlal Nehru to launch an Indian nuclear programme known as the Atomic Energy Commission.
He was found dead when Air India Flight 101 crashed near Mont Blanc on January 24, 1966. The cross-section of electron-positron scattering in quantum physics was termed “Bhabha scattering” in his honour.
Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya was a civil engineer, educator, and statesman who was born on September 15, 1860. From 1912 until 1918, Visvesvaraya was the Diwan of Mysore. In 1955, he was awarded India’s highest honour, the Bharat Ratna.
He developed an extensive irrigation system on the Deccan Plateau and created an automated weir water floodgate system, which was initially installed in 1903 at Khadakvasla Reservoir near Pune. These gates raised the reservoir’s storage level to the highest level possible without triggering dam damage. Similar technology was built at various dams in Karnataka based on the success of these gates.
Visvesvaraya designed a flood prevention system for the city of Hyderabad. He played a crucial role in developing a mechanism to defend Visakhapatnam’s port from sea erosion. He is also known as the “Father of Modern Mysore State.”
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born in Lahore, British India, on October 19, 1910. He is an Indian-American astrophysicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 with William A. Fowler for their contributions to the mathematical theory of black holes.
His work on energy radiation from stars, white dwarfs, stellar dynamics, stochastic processes, radiative transfer, the quantum theory of the hydrogen anion, hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability, turbulence, equilibrium, and the stability of ellipsoidal figures of equilibrium, general relativity, mathematical theory of black holes, and theory of colliding gravitational waves, which are the dying remnants of stars, is his most well-known work.
A theoretical physicist and mathematician from India, Satyendra Nath Bose was born on January 1st, 1894. The Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian honour, was bestowed to him by the Government of India in 1954.
Based on the original German and French studies on Einstein’s special and general relativity, Bose wrote the first book in English in 1919. He began working at the University of Dhaka’s Department of Physics in 1921 as a Reader. To teach advanced courses for MSc and BSc honours students, Bose established new departments with laboratories. He also taught thermodynamics and James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism.
He is well known for his work in quantum mechanics alongside the legendary scientist Albert Einstein, which led to the formulation of two theories: Bose-Einstein statistics and Bose-Einstein condensate.
On May 18, 1929, Venkatraman Radhakrishnan was born in the Chennai neighbourhood of Tondaripet. Venkataraman was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was a well-known radio astronomer in the world.
He was a world-renowned astronomer who designed and built ultralight aircraft and sailboats. He was involved in the development of a 10.4-meter millimetre-wave radio antenna, the amount of Deuterium in the galaxy, Astrophysical Raman Masers, OH emission from clouds, and the construction of low-frequency telescopes at Gauribidanur and Mauritius.
Many issues concerning pulsars, interstellar clouds, galaxy topologies, and other celestial bodies were answered by his observations and theoretical concepts.
Indian mathematician Ramanujan was born in Tamil Nadu on December 22, 1887. He contributed significantly to the number theory, infinite series, and mathematical analysis.
He received a book on advanced trigonometry authored by S. L. Loney at 11 and mastered it by 13 while developing complicated theorems on his own. By the age of 14, he had obtained merit certificates and academic prizes that he had continued to get throughout his school career, and he had demonstrated knowledge of geometry and infinite series. In 1902, Ramanujan was shown how to solve cubic problems; he later created his method for solving quartic equations.
After meeting the founder of the Indian Mathematical Society, V. Ramaswamy Aiyer, in 1910, Ramanujan began to gain attention in Madras’ mathematical circles, leading to his enrollment as a researcher at the University of Madras. Ramanujan had no
mathematical background and all of his discoveries were discovered by sheer intuition.
Plant biologist and physicist J.C. Bose was an Indian who was born at Bikrampur, West Bengal, on November 30, 1858. In addition to establishing the experimental research foundation for the Indian subcontinent, he was a pioneer in the field of radio and microwave optics, which is used to assess plant development.
He was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio waves, creating wireless communication for the first time. He is also known as the “Father of Open Technology” since he openly contributed his work and discoveries for others to develop. He is infamous for not wanting his innovations to be copyrighted.
Another well-known invention is his crescograph, which he used to measure how plants responded to various stimuli and suggest that they could be able to grasp emotions like love and grief.
Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai, born on August 12, 1919, was an Indian physicist and astronomer who pioneered space exploration and contributed to the development of nuclear power in India. He is known across the world as the “Father of the Indian Space Program.”
Vikram was born into the rich Sarabhai family and attended Gujarat College in Ahmedabad before continuing his education at the University of Cambridge in England. He received a PhD for his research on “Cosmic Ray Investigations in Tropical Latitudes.”
The launch of Russia’s Sputnik satellite prompted him to establish an Indian space agency, which resulted in the formation of ISRO. Sarabhai began work on a project to build and launch an Indian spacecraft. As a result, the first Indian satellite, Aryabhata, was launched into orbit from a Russian cosmodrome in 1975.
For his contributions, he received the Padma Bhushan in 1966 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1972.
Abdul Kalam, who was born as Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, was an Indian aeronautical scientist and statesman who served as India’s 11th President from 2002 to 2007. He grew up in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, where he studied physics and aeronautical engineering. As an aeronautical engineer, he worked for the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
Kalam joined the Defence Research and Development Organisation as a scientist after graduating from the Madras Institute of Technology in 1960. (DRDS). He began his career by building a tiny hovercraft but was unconvinced by his choice of a position at DRDO. Kalam also served on the INCOSPAR committee, led by famous space scientist Vikram Sarabhai.
In 1969, Kalam was transferred to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), where he was the project director of India’s first Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV-III), successfully launching the Rohini satellite into near-Earth orbit in July 1980.
He has won several honours, including India’s highest civilian accolade, the Bharat Ratna.
India has had many scientists who have made their contributions to the field of science, and whose names have been etched in the history of the country. We will forever indebted towards these great people who made great discoveries.
