Science and Technology: Scientists

Science and Technology: Scientists

1.Aryabhatta:
Aryabhatta is a renowned mathematician and astronomer of ancient India. He was born in 476 AD in Kerala. He studied at the University of Nalanda. One of his major work was Aryabhatiya written in 499 AD. The book dealt with many topics like astronomy, spherical trigonometry, arithmetic, algebra and plane trigonometry. He jotted his inventions in mathematics and astronomy in verse form. The book was translated into Latin in the 13th century. Through the translated Latin version of the Aryabhattiya, the European mathematicians learned how to calculate the areas of triangles, volumes of spheres as well as how to find out the square and cube root.

In the field of astronomy, Aryabhatta was the pioneer to infer that the Earth is spherical and it rotates on its own axis which results in day and night. He even concluded that the moon is dark and shines because of the light of sun. He gave a logical explanation to the theory of solar and lunar eclipses. He declared that eclipses are caused due to the shadows casted by the Earth and the moon. Aryabhatta proposed the geocentric model of the solar system which states that the Earth is in the center of the universe and also laid the foundation for the concept of Gravitation. His propounded methods of astronomical calculations in his Aryabhatta-Siddhatha which was used to make the the Panchanga (Hindu calendar). What Copernicus and Galileo propounded was suggested by Aryabhatta nearly 1500 years ago.

Aryabhatta's contribution in mathematics is unparalleled. He suggested formula to calculate the areas of a triangle and a circle, which were correct. The Gupta ruler, Buddhagupta, appointed him the Head of the University for his exceptional work. Aryabhatta gave the irrational value of pi. He deduced ? = 62832/20000 = 3.1416 claiming, that it was an approximation. He was the first mathematician to give the 'table of the sines', which is in the form of a single rhyming stanza, where each syllable stands for increments at intervals of 225 minutes of arc or 3 degrees 45'. Alphabetic code has been used by him to define a set of increments. If we use Aryabhatta's table and calculate the value of sin(30) (corresponding to hasjha) which is 1719/3438 = 0.5; the value is correct. His alphabetic code is commonly known as the Aryabhata cipher.

2.Vikram Sarabhai:
Considered as the Father of the Indian Space Program, Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai was born on 12th August 1919 to Ambalal Sarabhai and Sarala Sarabhai. After matriculating from the Gujarat College, he cleared the Intermediate Science Examination and moved to London. He joined St. John's College, University of Cambridge. Due to the problems of Second World War he returned to India and joined the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

This innovator got married to the famous dancer of that time, Mrinalini Sarabhai in 1942. The whole family of Vikram Sarabhai was involved in freedom struggle and he himself was greatly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi. Vikram Sarabhai again went abroad and after getting doctorate's degree for his thesis 'Cosmic Ray Investigation in Tropical Latitudes', Sarabhai returned to India in 1947. After returning to an independent India he felt the need of science and technology for the development of the nation. He wholeheartedly plunged into developing the Space Programs of India. He was not an ordinary scientist interested in just development of rockets and space programs instead was the man who was inclined to use all the aspects of science and technology as 'levers of development'.

To help the cause of the developing India, Vikram Sarabhai founded the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad. He was not just a scientist, but a dreamer, an innovator who not only developed science and technology institutions but also laid the foundation of some of the developmental and management institutes. The Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad and the Nehru Foundation for Development are the two world- famous organizations established by this philanthropist. He also set up Ahmadabad Textiles Industrial Research Association(ATIRA),Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) and Blind Man Association(BMA). One of the greatest achievements of Vikram Sarabhai was the development of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). It was due to his efforts that this space organization came into being.

Vikram Sarabhai left for his heavenly abode on 31st December 1971 at Kovalam.

3.Sir C.V. Raman:
Bharat Ratna and Nobel Prize winner Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman is known for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the Raman effect, named after him. He received the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work.

Born in Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu on November 7, 1888, he completed his Bachelors and Masters degrees from Presidency College, Madras. Shortly thereafter, he joined the Indian Finance Department as an Assistant Accountant General in Kolkata.

Later, he started doing experiments at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS). In 1917, Raman resigned from his government service and took up the newly created post of Palit Professorship in Physics at the University of Calcutta. At the same time, he continued with his research at IACS. He presided over the 16th session of the Indian Science Congress in 1929.

In addition to his Nobel prize winning work on the scattering of light, Raman worked on the acoustics of musical instruments. In 1934, he became the director of the newly established Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and in 1947 was appointed as the first National Professor by the new government of free India.

He was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1954 and received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1957. The government has honoured Sir CV Raman by declaring 28th February every year as National Science Day to commemorate Raman's discovery in 1928.

4.Jagdish Chandra Bose:
Eminent scientist Jagdish Chandra Bose was the first to prove that plants have feelings. Born on November 30, 1858 in Mymensingh in present-day Bangladesh, Jagdish Chandra Bose is credited with inventing wireless telegraphy a year before Marconi patented his invention. Jagdish's father Bhagabanchandra Bose served as a Deputy Magistrate. Young Jagdish Chandra Bose had his early education in his village school before moving to Kolkata in 1869. He graduated in physical sciences in 1879, before leaving for England in 1880.

He studied medicine at the London University for a year but could not complete the course due to his ill health. He moved to Cambridge after getting a scholarship to study Natural Science at Christ's College, Cambridge. In 1885, he came back to India with a B.Sc. degree. Upon his return, he was offered lectureship at Presidency College, Kolkata, but on a salary that was half of what was paid to his English colleagues. Though he accepted the job, he refused to draw his salary in protest till the time the college conceded his demand and he was paid full salary from the date of joining. Many of his students went on to become famous in their own right, which include names like Satyendra Nath Bose and Meghnad Saha.

In 1894, Jagadish Chandra Bose started devoting his time and energy to pure research. He carried out experiments involving refraction, diffraction and other scientific processes. He shifted from physics to the study of metals and plants. Jagdish Chandra Bose showed that plants too have life and invented an instrument to record the pulse of plants. Besides his research, he founded the Bose Institute at Kolkata, mainly dedicated to the study of plants. This great scientist died on November 23, 1937.

5.Homi J. Bhabha:
Famous Indian nuclear physicist Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born on 30 October 1909 in Mumbai. Bhabha played a key role in the development of the Indian atomic energy program. Widely referred to as the father of India's nuclear weapons program, Bhabha had his education at the Elphinstone College and the Royal Institute of Science before obtaining his doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1934. He was influenced greatly by the legendary Paul Dirac. Bhabha was a research scientist at the Cavendish Laboratories at Cambridge. When he was stranded in India as a result of the Second World War, he set up the Cosmic Ray Research Unit at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore under Nobel Laureate C. V. Raman in 1939.

Dr. Bhabha is credited with establishing the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research(TIFR) with the help of eminent industrialist J. R. D. Tata. After India won independence from the British, Bhabha established the Atomic Energy Commission of India in 1948. He represented India in various international forums including the United Nations and his tenure represented a high in terms of the progress of India's atomic energy programme. The climax of this programme came on May 18, 1974 when India exploded a nuclear device at Pokhran, Rajasthan joining a select club of nations.

This legendary scientist died in an air crash near Mont Blanc on Januuary 24, 1966. Many possible theories have been advanced for the aircrash, including a conspiracy theory. The atomic energy centre in Trombay was renamed as Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in his honour. In addition to being a famous scientist, Bhabha was also a painter and a classical music and opera enthusiast, besides being an amateur botanist.

6.Harish Chandra:
Harish Chandra was a renowned physicist and mathematician of India. His father Chandrakishore was a civil engineer. Harish Chandra spent his childhood at his maternal grandfather's home in Kanpur. At an early age he received education from a tutor. He studied at Christ Church High School till the age of fourteen, and passed his intermediate degree from Kanpur. He went to the University of Allahabad and studied theoretical physics, influenced by Dirac's Principles of Quantum Mechanics. He passed graduation in 1941 and achieved master's degree in 1943. He was a postgraduate research fellow under the supervision of Homi Bhabha on problems in theoretical physics, at the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore. He married Lalitha Kale and had two daughters.

K S Krishnan was Harish Chandra's teacher at Allahabad University; he recommended his name to Dirac for research work at Cambridge for his Ph.D. degree. In 1945, Harish-Chandra studied for his doctorate degree at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, under Dirac's supervision. However, he was not quite satisfied with Dirac's lectures when he realized that Dirac was actually reading from his books. During his days in Cambridge, he started to loose interest in Physics and took more interest in mathematics and attended the lecture courses of Littlewood and Hall. While attending a lecture by Pauli, he pointed out an error in Pauli's work. Later Pauli and Harish Chandra became very close friends. In 1947, he received his doctorate degree for his thesis 'Infinite irreducible representations of the Lorentz group. In the thesis he gave "a complete classification of the irreducible unitary representations of SL(2,C)".

Harish Chandra accompanied Dirac to Princeton from 1947 to 1948 and worked as his assistant. During his stay at United States, the leading mathematicians Weyl, Artin and Chevalley who were working there had great impact on him. He remained at Princeton for another year even after Dirac came back to Cambridge. At Harvard from 1949-50, he was influenced by Zariski.. Harish Chandra was a faculty at the Columbia University from 1950-63, this duration is considered to be the most productive period of his career where he worked on representations of semisimple Lie groups. During this period he worked in many institutions. From 1955-56 he was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, from 1957-58 as a Guggenheim Fellow in Paris.

Harish Chandra formulated a fundamental theory of representations of Lie groups and Lie algebras. He even extended the concept of a characteristic representation of finite-dimensional of semisimple Lie groups to infinite-dimensional representations of a case and formulated a Weyl's character formula analogue. Some of his other contributions are: the specific determination of the Plancherel measure for semisimple groups, the evaluation of the representations of discrete series, based on the results of Eisenstein series and in the concept of automorphic forms, his "philosophy of cusp forms", including the real Lie groups, but also p-adic groups or groups over adele rings. While working at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton from 1963, he was appointed IBM-von Neumann Professor in 1968.

7.Bhaskara I:
Bhaskara I was an Indian mathematician of the 7th century, who probably lived between c.600- c.680. He was most likely the first to use a circle for the zero in the Hindu-Arabic decimal system, and while commenting on Aryabhata's work, he evaluated an extraordinary rational approximation of the sine function. There is very little information about Bhaskara's life. He is said to be born near Saurashtra in Gujarat and died in Ashmaka. He was educated by his father in astronomy. He is considered to be a follower of Aryabhata I and one of the most renowned scholars of Aryabhata's astronomical school.

Bhaskara I wrote two treatises, the Mahabhaskariya and the Laghubhaskariya. He also wrote commentaries on the work of Aryabhata I entitled Aryabhatiyabhasya. The Mahabhaskariya comprises of eight chapters dealing with mathematical astronomy. The book deals with topics such as: the longitudes of the planets; association of the planets with each other and also with the bright stars; the lunar crescent; solar and lunar eclipses; and rising and setting of the planets. Bhaskara I suggested a formula which was astonishingly accurate value of Sine. The formula is: sin x = 16x (p - x)/[5p2 - 4x (p - x)] Bhaskara I wrote the Aryabhatiyabhasya in 629,, which is a commentary on the Aryabhatiya written by Aryabhata I. Bhaskara I commented only on the 33 verses of Aryabhatiya which is about mathematical astronomy and discusses the problems of the first degree of indeterminate equations and trigonometric formula. While discussing about Aryabhatiya he discussed about cyclic quadrilateral. He was the first mathematician to discuss about quadrilaterals whose four sides are not equal with none of the opposite sides parallel.

For many centuries, the approximate value of p was considered v10. But Bhaskara I did not accept this value and believed that p had an irrational value which later proved to be true. Some of the contributions of Bhaskara I to mathematics are: numbers and symbolism, the categorization of mathematics, the names and solution of the first degree equations, quadratic equations, cubic equations and equations which have more than one unknown value, symbolic algebra, the algorithm method to solve linear indeterminate equations which was later suggested by Euclid, and formulated certain tables for solving equations that occurred in astronomy.

8.Bhaskara II:
Bhaskara II is a well-known mathematician of ancient India. He was born in 1114 AD in Vijayapura, India. Bhaskara II is also known as Bhaskaracharya, which means "Bhaskara the Teacher". His father Mahesvara was as an astrologer, who taught him mathematics, which he later passed on to his son Loksamudra.

Bhaskara II was the head of the astronomical observatory at Ujjain, the chief mathematical center of ancient India. It goes to the credit of Varahamihira and Brahmagupta, the leading mathematicians who worked there and built up this school of mathematical astronomy. He wrote six books and the seventh book, which is attributed to him, is considered to be a forgery. The subjects of his six works are arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, geometry, and astronomy. The six works are: Lilavati on mathematics; Bijaganita on algebra; the Siddhantasiromani which is divided into two parts: mathematical astronomy and sphere; the Vasanabhasya of Mitaksara which is Bhaskaracharya's views on the Siddhantasiromani ; the Karanakutuhala or Brahmatulya in which he simplified the concepts of Siddhantasiromani ; and the Vivarana which comments on the Shishyadhividdhidatantra of Lalla. From the mathematical point of view the first three of these works are the most interesting.

Bhaskara II wrote Siddhanta Shiromani at the age of 36 in 1150 AD. This colossal work is divided into four parts Lilawati, Beejaganit, Ganitadhyaya and Goladhyaya and consists of about 1450 verses. Each part of the book consists of huge number of verses and can be considered as a separate book: Lilawati has 278, Beejaganit has 213, Ganitadhyaya has 451 and Goladhyaya has 501 verses. He formulated simple ways of calculations from Arithmetic to Astronomy in this book. He wrote Lilawati is an excellent lucid and poetic language. It has been translated in various languages throughout the world.

Few important contributions of BhaskarII to mathematics are as follows:

Terms for numbers

In English, the multiples of 1000 are termed as thousand, million, billion, trillion, quadrillion etc. These terms were named recently in English, but Bhaskaracharya gave the terms for numbers in multiples of ten which are as follows: eka(1), dasha(10), shata(100), sahastra(1000), ayuta(10,000), laksha(100,000), prayuta (1,000,000=million), koti(107), arbuda(108), abja(109=billion), kharva (1010), nikharva (1011), mahapadma (1012=trillion), shanku(1013), jaladhi(1014), antya(1015=quadrillion), Madhya (1016) and parardha(1017).

Kuttak

Kuttak according to modern mathematics is 'indeterminate equation of first order'. In the western world, the method of solving such equations was called as 'pulverizer'. Bhaskara suggested a generalized solution to get multiple answers for these equations.

Chakrawaal

Chakrawaal, according to western mathematics is the "indeterminate equation of second order". It is also called Pell's equation. The equation was first solved by an ancient Indian mathematician, Brahmagupta (628 AD) and given in his Brahmasphutasiddhanta. Bhaskara II converted the method and gave a generalized solution.

Simple mathematical methods

Bhaskara II suggested simple methods to calculate the squares, square roots, cube, and cube roots of big numbers. The Pythagoras theorem was proved by him in only two lines. Bhaskara's 'Khandameru'is the famous Pascal Triangle. Pascal, the European mathematician was born 500 years after Bhaskara. In Lilawati, he solved several problems on permutations and combinations and called the method as 'ankapaash'. He even gave an approximate value of PI as 22/7, which is 3.1416. He was even familiar with the concept of infinity and called it as 'khahar rashi', which means 'anant'.

He died in 1185 in Ujjain, India