1. A. Kapustin Yar
“Aryabhata”, India's first indigenously built satellite was
launched on 19 April 1975 from Kapustin Yar, a Russian rocket launch and
development site in Astrakhan Oblast using a Kosmos-3M launch vehicle. It was
built by the Indian Space Research Organisation under the leadership of U.R.
Rao. The launch came from an agreement between India and the Soviet Union
directed by UR Rao and signed in 1972.
The satellite was named after the 5th century astronomer and
mathematician “Aryabhata”. The satellite's image appeared on the reverse of
Indian two rupee banknotes between 1976 and 1997.
2. C. Prafulla
Chandra Ray
Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray (2
August 1861 – 16 June 1944) was a Bengali chemist, educationist, historian, industrialist
and philanthropist. A leading Bengali nationalist, he established the first
Indian research school in chemistry and is regarded as the “father of chemical
science in India”. Showing great promise in his studies as a young man in
Bengal, he was awarded a fellowship to the University of Edinburgh in 1882,
where he received his BS and then his PhD in 1887. In a day when organic
chemistry was all the rage, he chose to pursue inorganic chemistry, becoming an
expert in mineral salts, such as sulfates and nitrites.
The Royal Society of Chemistry
honoured his life and work with the first ever “Chemical Landmark Plaque”
outside Europe. He was the founder of “Bengal Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals”,
India's first pharmaceutical company. He is the author of “A History of Hindu
Chemistry from the Earliest Times to the Middle of Sixteenth Century” (1902).
In 1897, he announced a major
discovery of a new compound, “mercurous nitrite” through an article, which was
published in several papers and Journals drawing attention worldwide.
3. A. 1729
“Hardy-Ramanujan Number” – (1729) is
the smallest nontrivial "taxicab number", i.e., the smallest number
representable in two ways as a sum of two cubes. It is given by:
1729=1^3+12^3=9^3+10^3
So far, six taxicab numbers are known.
They are:
The Hardy-Ramanujan number is named
such after an anecdote of the British mathematician G.H. Hardy who had gone to
visit Srinivasa Ramanujan (22 December 1887 – 26 April 1920), Indian
mathematician in hospital. The anecdote is a part of Ramanujan's biography 'The
Man Who Knew Infinity' by Robert Kanigel. Mr. Hardy quipped that he came in a
taxi with the number '1729' which seemed a fairly ordinary number. Ramanujan
said that it was not. 1729, the Hardy-Ramanujan Number, is the smallest number
which can be expressed as the sum of two different cubes in two different ways.
Srinivasa Ramanujan, who lived only 32
years, had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial
contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and
continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered
unsolvable.
4. A. Satyendra Nath Bose
Satyendra Nath Bose, (1
January 1894 – 4 February 1974) was an Indian physicist specialising in
theoretical physics. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the
early 1920s, providing the foundation for "Bose–Einstein
statistics" and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. A Fellow of
the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the
Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India.
The class of particles that obey
Bose–Einstein statistics, "bosons" (also known as "God Particle"), was named after Bose by Paul
Dirac.
A polymath, he had a wide range of
interests in varied fields including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology,
mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature, and music. He served on many research
and development committees in sovereign India.
5. A. C. V. Raman
Sir Chandrashekhara Venkata Raman (7
November 1888 – 21 November 1970) was an Indian physicist who made
ground-breaking works in the field of light scattering. With his student K. S.
Krishnan at the "Indian Association for the Cultivation of
Science", he discovered that when light traverses a transparent material,
some of the deflected light changes wavelength and amplitude. This phenomenon,
subsequently known as Raman scattering, results from the Raman effect. His
works earned him the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physics and was the first Indian or
Asian or non-white person to receive Nobel Prize in any branch of science.
In 1954, the Government of India
honoured him with Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian award. February 28 is
recognised as the National Science Day in India to commemorate day of the
discovery of Raman effect in 1928.
(C.V. Raman at the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1930)
The Indian Academy of Sciences was
founded by C. V. Raman at Bangalore in 1934.
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