C. V. Raman

<p>Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born on November 7, 1888, in Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, into a Tamil Brahmin family of scholars. His father was a lecturer in mathematics and physics. A child prodigy, Raman passed his matriculation at age eleven and earned his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Presidency College, Chennai, with highest academic honors at age nineteen, publishing original research papers in the British <em>Philosophical Magazine</em> while still an undergraduate.</p><p>Unable to secure a scientific post in colonial India, Raman entered the Indian Finance Department in Calcutta in 1907 as an Assistant Accountant-General. For a decade, he led a remarkable double life: balancing civil accounts by day, and conducting tireless experimental physics by evening and dawn at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) at Bowbazar Street.</p><p>In 1917, Raman resigned from his lucrative government post to accept the Palit Chair of Physics at the University of Calcutta. In the summer of 1921, during a sea voyage across the Mediterranean, he became fascinated by the deep opalescent blue of the water, disproving Lord Rayleigh's theory that ocean color was merely a reflection of the sky and showing it resulted from molecular light scattering. On February 28, 1928, working with K. S. Krishnan, Raman discovered inelastic scattering of light (the Raman Effect), proving the quantum nature of photons. For this discovery, he received the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics, knighthood, and later the Bharat Ratna (1954). He served as the first Indian Director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore and founded the Raman Research Institute, dedicating his entire life to Indian scientific self-reliance.</p>