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Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937)
jagadish Chandra Bose was born on 30 November 1858, in
Myemsingh, Faridpur, a part of the Dhaka District now in Bangladesh. He
attended the village school till he was 11. He then moved to Kolkata where he
enrolled in St. Xavier' '  's. He was very much interested in Biology. However,
Father Lafont, a famous Professor of Physics, inspired in Bose a great interest
in Physics.
Having obtained his B.A. in physical sciences, twenty two year old
Bose left for London, to obtain a medical degree. However, he kept falling ill
and had to discontinue his plans to be a doctor. He then obtained his B.A.
degree from Christ College, Cambridge.
He returned to India in 1885 and joined Presidency College, Kolkata
as an Assistant Professor of Physics, where he remained till 1915. There was
a peculiar practice in the college at that time. The Indian teachers in the college
were paid one third of what the British teachers were paid! So Bose refused
his salary but worked for three years. The fourth year he was paid in full! He
was an excellent teacher, extensively using scientific demonstrations in class.
Some of his students, such as S. N. Bose went on to become famous physicists
themselves.
During this period, Bose also started doing original scientific work in
the area of microwaves, carrying out experiments involving refraction,
diffraction and polarization. He developed the use of galena crystals for making
receivers, both for short wavelength radio waves and for white and ultraviolet
light. In 1895, two years before Marconi' '  's demonstration, Bose demonstrated
wireless communication using radio waves, using them to ring a bell remotely
and to explode some gunpowder.
Many of the microwave components familiar today - waveguides, horn
antennas, polarizers, dielectric lenses and prisms, and even semiconductor
detectors of electromagnetic radiation - were invented and used by Bose in
the last decade of the nineteenth century. He also suggested the existence of
electromagnetic radiation from the Sun, which was confirmed in 1944.
Bose then turned his attention to response phenomena in plants. He
showed that not only animal but vegetable tissues, produce similar electric
response under different kinds of stimuli ' '  '  " mechanical, thermal, electrical
and chemical.
Bose was knighted in 1917 and soon thereafter elected Fellow of the
Royal Society, London, (both as physicist and biologist!). Bose had worked
all along without the right kind of scientific instruments and laboratory. For a
long time he had been thinking of building a laboratory. The result was the
establishment of the Bose Research Institute in Kolkata. It continues to be a
famous centre of research in basic sciences.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)
Ramanujan was born in Erode, a small village in Tamil Nadu on 22
December 1887. When he was a year old his family moved to the town of
Kumbakonam, where his father worked as a clerk in a cloth merchant' '  's shop.
When he was nearly five years old, Ramanujan enrolled in the primary school.
In 1898 he joined the Town High School in Kumbakonam. At the Town High
School, Ramanujan did well in all subjects and proved himself an able all
round scholar. It was here that he came across the book Synopsis of Elementary
Results in Pure Mathematics by G. S. Carr. Influenced by the book, he began
working on mathematics on his own, summing geometric and arithmetic series.
He was given a scholarship to the Government College in
Kumbakonam. However his scholarship was not renewed because Ramanujan
neglected all subjects other than mathematics. In 1905 he appeared for the
First Arts examination which would have allowed him to be admitted to the
University of Madras. Again he failed in all subjects other than mathematics,
a performance he repeated in 1906 and 1907 too. In the following years he
worked on mathematics, with only Carr' '  's book as a guide, noting his results
in what would become the famous Notebooks.
He got married in 1909 and started looking for a job. His search took
him to many influential people, among them Ramachandra Rao, one of the
founding members of the Indian Mathematical Society. For a year he was
supported by Ramachandra Rao who gave him Rs. 25 per month. He started
posing and solving problems in the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society.
His research paper on Bernoulli numbers, in 1911, brought him recognition
and he became well known in Chennai as a mathematical genius. In 1912,
with Ramachandra Rao' '  's help, he secured the post of clerk in the accounts
section of the Madras Port Trust. He continued to pursue mathematics and in
1913 he wrote to G. H. Hardy in Cambridge, enclosing a long list of his own
theorems. Hardy immediately recognized Ramanujan' '  's mathematical ability.
On the basis of Hardy' '  's letters, Ramanujan was given a scholarship by the
University of Madras in 1913. In 1914, Hardy arranged for him to go to Trinity
College, Cambridge.
Ramanujan' '  's work with Hardy produced important results right from
the beginning. In 1916 Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor
of Science by Research. In 1918, he was elected a Fellow of the Cambridge
Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and a Fellow
of Trinity College, Cambridge, all in the same year! However, from 1917
onwards he was seriously ill and mostly bedridden. In 1919 he returned to
India, in very poor health.
Ramanujan made outstanding contributions to analytical number
theory, elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. His published
and unpublished works have kept some of the best mathematical brains in the
world busy to this day.
Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman
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Sir C.