C. V. Raman
1888 – 1970 · India
Known for: Indian physicist who discovered the Raman effect and won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics
“He turned a question about the colour of the sea into a permanent instrument of science.”
Biography
Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born on 7 November 1888 in Tiruchirappalli, in what is now Tamil Nadu, the second of eight children of a schoolteacher who taught mathematics and physics. The family moved to Visakhapatnam, where Raman passed his matriculation at eleven and his intermediate examination at thirteen, first in both under the local board. At Presidency College in Madras he took a bachelor's degree at sixteen with gold medals in physics and English, and published his first paper, on diffraction bands from a rectangular aperture, in the Philosophical Magazine at eighteen. A physician judged him too frail for the English climate, so instead of studying abroad he sat the Indian Finance Service examination, came first, and was posted to Calcutta as Assistant Accountant General at nineteen.
In Calcutta he found the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, founded in 1876 and then without regular researchers, and obtained permission to work there outside office hours, sometimes at very unusual ones. His 1907 note on Newton's rings in polarised light was the first paper the institute produced. In 1917 he left government service to become the first Palit Professor of Physics at the University of Calcutta. Sailing to Europe, the deep blue of the Mediterranean led him to reject the accepted explanation that the colour was merely sky light reflected from the surface, and he turned to the scattering of light in liquids. On 28 February 1928, working with his student K. S. Krishnan and a spectrograph of his own design, he showed that light passing through a transparent medium emerges with a shifted wavelength, the effect that carries his name.
The Nobel Prize in Physics followed in 1930, the first awarded to an Asian scientist. Raman had founded the Indian Journal of Physics in 1926; he moved to Bengaluru in 1933 as the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science and established the Indian Academy of Sciences, and in 1948 founded the Raman Research Institute, where he worked until his death on 21 November 1970. His nephew Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar also became a Nobel laureate. India marks 28 February each year as National Science Day.