Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman was born in 1888 in Tamil Nadu. He had his early education at Vishakhapatnam and Madras. After obtaining his M.A. degree in Physics in 1907, he appeared at the Financial Civil Service Competitive Examination, and having topped the list of successful candidates, he was appointed Deputy Accountant General, in Kolkata.

Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, the vice chancellor of the Kolkata University, offered him the post of the Plait Professor of Physics at the University. In 1919, he was made the ‘Secretary of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science’, and in 1922, he was awarded D.Sc. by the Kolkata University.

Raman’s research work in the laboratory of IACs in Kolkata culminated in the discovery of the ‘Raman Effect’. In 1928, Raman went to Bangalore in 1933, and became the Director of the Indian Institute of Science. There in 1943, Raman founded his own institute near Bangalore, the Raman Research Institute.

Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930, for his discovery of ‘Raman Effect’. It opened up the unknown routes to unveil the mysteries of light wave optics, acoustics, and colloids and so on. Raman Spectroscopy now finds applications in almost every branch of scientific research.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

Honour came to Raman from different quarters of the world. He was knighted by the British Government in 1929. In 1934, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of

London. He was conferred the highest title of ‘Bharat Ratna’ by the government of India in 1954. C.V. Raman passed away in 1970.