C.V. RAMAN

Birth: 7h November 1888/ Death :21t November 1970


Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born on November 7,1888, at Trichinopoly in India. He is the most famous Indian physicist whose work was highly influential in the growth of science in India.

 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.


After earning a master's degree in physics at Presidency College, University of Madras, in 1907, Raman became an accountant in the finance department of the Indian government. He became professor of physics at the University of Calcutta in 1917. Studying the scattering of light in various substances, in 1928 he found that when a transparent substance is illuminated by a beam of light of one frequency, a small portion of the light emerges at right angles to the original direction. He also found that some of this light is of different frequencies than that of the incident light. These so called Raman frequencies are equal to the infrared frequencies for the scattering material and are caused by the exchange of energy between the light and the material.


Raman was knighted in 1929, and in 1933 he moved to the Indian Institute of Science, at Bangalore, as the head of the department of physics. In 1947 he was named director of the Raman Research Institute there and in 1961 became a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science. He contributed to the building up of nearly every Indian research institution in his time. He was also the one behind the foundation of the Indian Journal of Physics and the Indian Academy of Sciences. Through these institutions he trained hundreds of students who found important posts in universities and govenment in lndia.