FAMOUS SCIENTISCTS

Roddam Narasimha

2012-02-05T10:27:00.000-08:00

Roddam Narasimha is an Indian aerospace scientist and fluid dynamicist. He was the chairman of the Engineering Mechanics Unit at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research JNCASR, India. He concurrently holds the Pratt & Whitney chair in science and engineering at the University of Hyderabad.

He was educated at University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE), Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, and obtained his PhD degree at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), United States in 1961.

He joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in 1962 and was associated with the department of aerospace engineering in various capacities from that date till 1999. In 1982, he founded the centre for atmospheric sciences (now centre for atmospheric and oceanic sciences), which he headed till 1989. During 1984 to 1993 he was the director of the NAL. For many years since 1983 he held a visiting position at Caltech, as Clark B Millikan Professor or Sherman Fairchild distinguished scholar. Between 1989 and 1990 he was Jawaharlal Nehru professor of engineering at Cambridge University in England. He had also held visiting positions at NASA Langley, University of Strathclyde, University of Brussels, and Adelaide University.

Narasimha’s research has been chiefly concerned with aerospace fluid dynamics and certain related problems in the atmosphere. He has made extensive studies of transitions between laminar and turbulent flow (going in either direction), the structure of shock waves, various characteristics of fully developed turbulent flow (e.g. their memory, the bursting phenomenon in boundary layers), the fluid dynamics of clouds, near-surface temperature distributions and eddy fluxes in atmospheric boundary layers. He has been closely associated with aerospace technology development in India at both technical and policy-making levels. During 1977-79, he was the Chief Project Coordinator in Hindustan Aeronautics Limited.

As Director of NAL he initiated and oversaw several major technology programmes. He served on the Board of Directors of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited for several years. As a member of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Scientific Advisory Council he was instrumental in establishing a major parallel computing initiative in the country. He was President of the Indian Academy of Sciences during 1992 till 1994 and spear-headed a new programme on university education in science, leading to the establishment of the journal Resonance and other Academy programmes involving teachers and students. He has served on the National Security Advisory Board and the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister Cabinet. He is currently a member of the Space Commission, and co-chairs the Joint Steering Committee and the Joint Scientific Working Group for the Indo-French atmospheric research satellite Megha-Tropiques.

Rajeev Motwani

2012-02-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

Rajeev Motwani was a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University whose research focused on theoretical computer science. He was an early advisor and supporter of companies including Google and PayPal, and a special advisor to Sequoia Capital. He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001.

Rajeev Motwani was born in Jammu to a Hindu Sindhi family. He grew up in New Delhi.His father was in the Indian Army. He has two brothers. As a child, inspired by luminaries like Gauss, he wanted to become a mathematician.

Motwani went to St Columba's School, New Delhi. He completed his B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur in 1983 and got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley in 1988 under the supervision of Richard Karp.

Motwani joined Stanford soon after U.C. Berkeley. Motwani was one of the co-authors (with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Terry Winograd) of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm, the basis for Google's search techniques. He also co-authored another seminal search paper What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket with those same authors.

He was also an author of two widely-used theoretical computer science textbooks, Randomized Algorithms (Cambridge University Press 1995, ISBN 978-0521474658, with Prabhakar Raghavan) and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation (2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2000, with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman).

Prior to his involvement with Google, Motwani founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS), an umbrella organization for several groups looking into new and innovative data management concepts. His research included data privacy, web search, robotics, and computational drug design.

He was an avid angel investor and had funded a number of successful startups to emerge from Stanford. He sat on the boards of Google, Kaboodle, Mimosa Systems, Adchemy, Baynote, Vuclip, NeoPath Networks (acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007), Tapulous and Stanford Student Enterprises among others. He was also active in the Business Association of Stanford Entrepeneurial Students (BASES).

He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001 for his work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation.

He served on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Computing, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

Motwani, and his wife Asha Jadeja, had two daughters named Naitri and Anya.

Motwani was found dead in his pool in the backyard of his Atherton home on June 5, 2009. The San Mateo County coroner, Robert Foucrault, ruled the death an accidental drowning. Toxicology tests also revealed that he had a blood-alcohol level of 0.26 percent, more than three times the level considered drunken driving in California. He could not swim, but was planning on taking lessons, according to his friends.

Willard Boyle

2012-01-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

Willard Sterling Boyle, CC (August 19, 1924 – May 7, 2011) was a Canadian physicist and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. On October 6, 2009, it was announced that he would share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit—the CCD sensor".

Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, he was the son of a medical doctor and moved to Quebec with his father and mother Beatrice when he was three. He was home schooled by his mother until age fourteen, when he attended Montreal's Lower Canada College to complete his secondary education. Boyle attended McGill University, but his education was interrupted in 1943, when he joined the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II. He was loaned to the Britain's Royal Navy, where he was learning how to land Spitfires on aircraft carriers as the war ended. He gained a BSc (1947), MSc (1948) and PhD (1950) from McGill University

After receiving his doctorate, Boyle spent one year at Canada's Radiation Lab and two years teaching physics at the Royal Military College of Canada. In 1953 Boyle joined Bell Labs where he invented the first continuously operating ruby laser with Don Nelson in 1962, and was named on the first patent for a semiconductor injection laser. He was made director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at the Bell Labs subsidiary Bellcomm in 1962, providing support for the Apollo space program and helping to select lunar landing sites. He returned to Bell Labs in 1964, working on the development of integrated circuits.

In 1969, Boyle and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), for which they have jointly received the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1973, the 1974 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award, the 2006 Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. The CCD allowed NASA to send clear pictures to Earth back from space. It is also the technology that powers many digital cameras today. Smith said of their invention: "After making the first couple of imaging devices, we knew for certain that chemistry photography was dead."

Boyle was Executive Director of Research for Bell Labs from 1975 until his retirement in 1979. In retirement, he split his time between Halifax and Wallace, Nova Scotia where he helped launch an art gallery with his wife Betty, a landscape artist.

T. T. Chang

2012-01-16T09:14:00.000-08:00

Chang was born in Shanghai on April 3, 1927 to a "scholar-gentry" family. Chang's father graduated from the Saint John's University in Shanghai and won the Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Scholarship Program and completed his study in the United States. Chang had three (older) sisters and one (younger) brother.

Chang finished his secondary education at the Saint John's School (a middle school afflicted to the Saint John's University) in Shanghai. Chang at beginning studied agricultural science at the Saint John's University in Shanghai, which was his father's alma mater.

After about one year, Chang transferred to the University of Nanking in Nanjing and majored in agriculture and horticulture. Chang graduated from University of Nanking with BSA in 1949.

After graduation, Chang worked for the Council of Agriculture in Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province. During this period of time Shen Tsung-han (1895–1980, born Ningbo, Zhejiang; death Taipei, Taiwan) was one of his mentors. Shen was the second and former Director-general of the Council of Agriculture.

In 1950, Chang moved to Taiwan and served as a technician in the Ministry of Agriculture. Recommended by Shen, in 1952 Chang went to study plant genetics at Cornell University which was also the alma mater of Shen (Shen received his PhD from Cornell).

Chang obtained his MSc from Cornell in 1954 and continued his study at the University of Minnesota where he earned PhD in 1959.

Chang went back to Taiwan in 1959. However, after two years of staying in Taiwan, Chang moved to Philippines and worked for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Laguna. From 1962 to 1991, Chang managed the International Rice Germplasm Center.

Jonas Salk

2012-01-10T03:12:00.001-08:00

Born: 28-Oct-1914
Birthplace: New York City
Died: 23-Jun-1995
Location of death: La Jolla, CA [1]
Cause of death: Heart Failure
Remains: Buried, El Camino Memorial Park, San Diego, CA

Gender: Male
Religion: Jewish
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Scientist, Inventor

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Discoverer of the first polio vaccine

American physician and epidemiologist Jonas Salk developed the first effective vaccine against poliomyelitis (polio), a crippling disease that killed more than 3,000 Americans at the epidemic's peak in 1952, and left many thousands more crippled or paralyzed. Salk began his research into polio in 1947, and tested his inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) or "killed-virus" polio vaccine in the early 1950s. The vaccine retained enough virulence to cause antibodies to be produced and thus immunize the shot's recipient, but not enough virulence to risk infection. Salk declined to have his vaccine patented, believing that royalties and profits would raise the cost and make the medicine unavailable to the poor. The vaccine was approved for public use on 12 April 1955.

Salk's finding made him a celebrity far beyond scientific circles, and led to complaints from colleagues that he had overrated his own contribution to the effort. His work was also deemed controversial because it had been lavishly funded by the March of Dimes' brilliant advertising campaign, far in excess of more common diseases including cancer and heart disease. All controversy aside, however, the vaccine created by Salk and his team reduced the instance of polio among American children by more than 90%, a decline that accelerated with the introduction of Albert Sabin's "live-virus" oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) in the 1960.

In 1959, Salk began planning what became the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, designed by architect Louis Kahn and constructed near San Diego. Opened in 1963, it remains one of the world's most prestigious facilities for research into AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and plant biology. He was born Jonas Salk, and legally added the middle name Edward prior to his first marriage in 1939. His brother, child psychologist Lee Salk, showed in 1960 that the sound of a mother's heartbeat calms a newborn infant. His second wife was the painter Françoise Gilot, who had been Pablo Picasso's lover and mother of two of his children. Her biography of Picasso became a best-seller, after the artist unsuccessfully sued to block its publication.

Vinod Johri

2012-01-10T03:04:00.000-08:00

Vinod Johri is an Indian astrophysicist. He is an eminent cosmologist, a retired professor of astrophysics at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and an emeritus professor at Lucknow University since 1995. Johri has over 75 research publications and articles published in pioneering journals. His major contributions in cosmological research include 'power law inflation, genesis of quintessence fields of dark energy and phantom cosmologies'. He is the co-author of the first model of 'power law inflation in Brans-Dicke Theory' along with C.Mathiazhagan. He has been honored by Uttar Pradesh Government by Research Award of the Council of Science & Technology (CSIR).

Johri has spent over 45 years researching in cosmology, acting as a research guide and principal investigator of various research projects of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research[2], Department of Science & Technology[3] and University Grants Commission of India[4]. Johri has been a Commonwealth Fellow, a senior visitor at Cambridge University (UK) and a Fellow of Royal Astronomical Society[5] of London. He has worked as consultant for UNESCO at United Nations Development Program[6] in Iran and as a DAAD Fellow at University of Mainz (Germany), as a visiting scientist at Hansen Lab (Gravity Probe B Group) Stanford University (USA) and as an International Scholar at Fine Theoretical Physics Institute[9] at University of Minnesota at Minneapolis (USA).

Johri was born in Etah (Uttar Pradesh), India on 10 June 1935. His father Dr. Bhairon Prasad Johri graduated from Veterinary College, Patna and worked as Livestock Officer, Allahabad, India. Johri's mother, Sarojini Johri was a home maker.

Johri completed his High School at Narain College[10], Shikohabad, India, with 12th rank in the state merit list. He was awarded First Prize in Chiranjeevi Dhiri Singh Provicial English Debate. He completed his Bachelor's in 1953 and Master's in Applied Mathematics in 1956 from Allahabad University scoring high ranks in the merit list. In 1957 he was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics Allahabad University, Allahabad. In 1960, Johri was appointed Assistant Professor in Mathematics at Gorakhpur University[12], Gorakhpur India, where he was conferred PhD degree in 1966 on his thesis "Gravitational Waves in Bondi Space-Time".

In 1967 Johri was awarded Commonwealth Fellowship for Post-Doctorate work at Department of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Cambridge University (UK), where he worked in close collaboration on cosmological problems with Dr.Dennis Sciama and research scholars Friedrich Hehl (Cologne), Fernando de Felice[14] (Padova, Italy), George Ellis(Capetown) and Stephen Hawking(UK) for his Post Doctorate program. In 1968 Johri was appointed Reader in Mathematics at Gorakhpur University. Between 1970–1972, Johri worked as UNESCO consultant to Government of Iran under United Nations Development Program at Teheran. Johri was elected a Fellow of Royal Astronomical Society of London in 1978.

Johri was a Commonwealth Fellow and a senior visitor to Cambridge University (UK). He was also a resident of Clare College, Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of Royal Astronomical Society of London in 1978. Johri was awarded the Royal Society Visiting Fellowship in 1989 for visiting Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) Cambridge, Southampton University (UK), Cardiff University and Queen Mary College, London under the Distinguished Scientists Exchange Program of British Council. In 1993, Johri was awarded DAAD Fellowship for his visiting assignment at Theoretical Physics Institute, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz(Germany).

Johri was honored with a 'Silver Plaque' by Council of Science & Technology, India for his distinguished work on Dark Energy in the year 2006. He is Life Member of Ganita Parishad and a founding member of the Indian Association of General Relativity and Gravitation.

Carl Sagan

2012-01-05T22:27:00.000-08:00

Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer and science popularizer. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He is world-famous for his popular science books and the television series Cosmos, which he co-wrote and presented. In his works he frequently advocated the scientific method.

Education and scientific career

Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Sam Sagan, was a Jewish garment worker and his mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, was a housewife. Sagan attended the University of Chicago, where he received a bachelor's degree (1955) and a master's degree (1956) in physics, before earning his doctorate (1960) in astronomy and astrophysics. He taught at Harvard University until 1968, when he moved to Cornell University.

Sagan became a full professor at Cornell in 1971 and directed a lab there. He contributed to most of the unmanned space missions that explored our solar system. He conceived the idea of adding an unalterable and universal message on spacecraft destined to leave the solar system, that could be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find it. The first message that was actually sent into space was a gold-anodized plaque attached to the space probe Pioneer 10. He continued to refine his designs and the most elaborate such message he helped to develop was the Voyager Golden Record that was sent out with the Voyager space probes.

Scientific achievements

Sagan was among the first to hypothesize that Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa may possess oceans (a subsurface ocean in the case of Europa) or lakes. Thus making the hypothesized water ocean on Europa potentially habitable for life. Europa's subsurface ocean was later indirectly confirmed by the spacecraft Galileo.

He furthered insights regarding the atmosphere of Venus, seasonal changes on Mars, and Saturn's moon Titan. Sagan established that the atmosphere of Venus is extremely hot and dense. He also perceived global warming as a growing, man-made danger and likened it to the natural development of Venus into a hot life-hostile planet through greenhouse gases. He suggested that the seasonal changes on Mars were due to windblown dust, not to vegetation changes, as others had proposed.

William Hyde Wollaston

2012-01-05T01:51:00.000-08:00

William Wollaston was an English scientist (chemist, physicist, and physiologist) who made contributions in each field. In 1813, he redesigned and improved the Volta’s pile. By joining cells of his battery he was able to construct very large batteries. He discovered the elements palladium and rhodium and first reported the dark lines in the spectrum of the Sun.

His consideration of geometrical arrangements of atoms led him into crystallography and the invention of the reflecting goniometer to measure angles of crystal faces. He also proved the elementary nature of niobium and titanium, developed a method of making platinum malleable, proved the identity of voltaic and frictional electricity, and invented the camera lucida to aid artists and microscopists. William Hyde Wollaston was born on August 6, 1766, in East Dereham, Norfolk, England, and during his life became a celebrated chemist, a natural philosopher, and a physiologist.

He was the son of vicar Francis and Althea (Hyde). He was educated at Charterhouse and at Caius College, Cambridge University (1782 to 1787). He received a degree in medicine in 1793, was immediately elected as a member of the Royal Society, and then began his medical practice in Huntingdon (London) in the same year. He also established a private laboratory to conduct research at the Royal Society in 1793, and became a foreign associate of the French Academy of Sciences. Between 1793 and 1797 he published several papers in science.

He became renowned in physiology. In 1797, he described the main components of urinary calculi. Then he suddenly gave up his medical practice in 1800 to devote time to pursue his dominant interest, scientific research. He became an associate of Humphry Davy at the Royal Institute. Wallaston was becoming partially blind about this time, also.

While working with Davy in 1809, he described a vibratory action of muscular activity. He identified a new type of bladder stone that he named “cystic oxide” (later called cystine) the first known amino acid in 1812, and then in 1824 he provided the best physiological description of the ear up to that time. He was a very careful experimenter in physiology.

Wollaston had verified the laws of double refraction in Iceland spar that had been studied by Huyghens, and from his work he wrote a treatise that he presented before members of the Royal Society on 24 June 1802.

Tim Berners-Lee

2012-01-05T01:49:00.000-08:00

JTim Berners-Lee want to see how much the world has changed in the past decade? Log on to the Internet, launch a search engine and type in the word enquire (British spelling, please). You’ll get about 30,000 hits. It turns out you can “enquire” about nearly anything online these days, from used Harley Davidsons for sale in Sydney, Australia (“Enquire about touring bikes. Click here!”), to computer-training-by-e-mail courses in India (“Where excellence is not an act but a habit”).

Click once to go to a site in Nairobi and enquire about booking shuttle reservations there. Click again, and zip off to Singapore, to a company that specializes in “pet moving.” Enquire about buying industrial-age nuts and bolts from “the Bolt Boys” in South Africa, or teddy bears in upstate New York. Exotic cigar labels! Tantric sex guides! Four-poster beds for dogs! So what, you say? Everybody knows that with a mouse, a modem and access to the Internet, these days you can point-and-click anywhere on the planet, unencumbered by time or space or long-distance phone tariffs.

Ah, but scroll down the list far enough, hundreds of entries deep, and you’ll find this hidden Rosebud of cyberspace: “Enquire Within Upon Everything” – a nifty little computer program written nearly 20 years ago by a lowly software consultant named Tim Berners-Lee. Who knew then that from this modest hack would flow the civilization-altering, millionaire-spawning, information suckhole known as the World Wide Web?

Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, this one truly was the work of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for the light bulb, but he had dozens of people in his lab working on it. William Shockley may have fathered the transistor, but two of his research scientists actually built it. And if there ever was a thing that was made by committee, the Internet – with its protocols and packet switching – is it. But the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee’s alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free.

It started, of all places, in the Swiss Alps. The year was 1980. Berners-Lee, doing a six-month stint as a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, was noodling around with a way to organize his far-flung notes. He had always been interested in programs that dealt with information in a “brain-like way” but that could improve upon that occasionally memory-constrained organ. So he devised a piece of software that could, as he put it, keep “track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn’t.” He called it Enquire, short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, a Victorian-era encyclopedia he remembered from childhood.

Building on ideas that were current in software design at the time, Berners-Lee fashioned a kind of “hypertext” notebook. Words in a document could be “linked” to other files on Berners-Lee’s computer; he could follow a link by number (there was no mouse to click back then) and automatically pull up its related document. It worked splendidly in its solipsistic, Only-On-My-Computer way.

Dionyz Ilkovic

2012-01-05T01:37:00.000-08:00

Dionyz Ilkovic was born in Sarissky Stiavnik, a town in the northern part of eastern Spiska Zupa, Slovakia. His father, Hilar Ilkovic (1874-1956), and mother, Irena Ilkovic nee Toronska (1881-1963), had four children: Mikulas (1904-1978), Dionyz, Alexej (1910-1944) and Marta (1912 – 1993). Dionyz was the second child in the family.

Czech Technical University

in Prague He was educated in an elementary public school in Fulianke (1912-1916), then in a catholic gymnasium in Presove (1916-1919), and later in a Czechoslovakian gymnasium in Presove (1919-1924). Then Dionyz Ilkovic went to Prague where he continued his education in the Czech Technical University (1924-1925) in electrical engineering.

He continued his education at the Natural Science Faculty of the Charles University in Prague (1925-1930) where he studied chemistry and physics. Dionyz Ilkovic met Prof. Heyrovsky in the Charles University and came to his lab for postgraduate study in 1930.

Ilkovic became a research assistant for Professor Heyrovsky in Prague. He worked in the field of polarography under supervision of Professor Heyrovsky. His first scientific paper about compensation of a capacity current was published in 1932 and in 11. 3. 1932 Ilkovic received his Ph.D.

Ilkovic was one of the co-founders of polarography. In the scientific world, he is known for his “Ilkovic’s equation” which is considered to be the basic rule of polarography. Based on experimental observations indicating that capillaries with equal flow-rates give approximately equal linear currents, and that the current increases with increasing height of the mercury column, and that the dependence has a shape of a parabola, Ilkovic successfully solved the problem of a current governed by the rate of diffision towards the electrode surface. Considering diffusion to a planar electrode with a surface area increasing with time for description of the transport to a growing mercury drop, Ilkovic derived for the mean limiting diffusion current (id), Equation 1, bearing his name:
id = 607 n C D1/2 m2/3 t1/6 (Eq. 1)

(where n is the number of transferred electrons; C is concentration of the redox probe, mM; D is the diffusion coefficient, cm2/s; m is the mercury flow rate, mg/s; and t is the drop-time, s).

Dionyz Ilkovic

After finishing his Ph.D. study with Prof. Heyrovsky in Prague, Ilkovic was teaching chemistry in different colleges (1932-1940). In 1934 he received a professor status there. In 1937/38 Ilkovic visited laboratory of Prof. Auduberta in Paris. In 1940 Ilkovic returned to Slovakia and until 1976 he was a professor at the Technical University and Science Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava. Professor D.

Ilkovic died from heart attack in 1980 and was buried in Crematory Bratislava, Slovakia.

Jean Piaget

2012-01-05T01:36:00.000-08:00

Jean Piaget, the pioneering Swiss philosopher and psychologist, spent much of his professional life listening to children, watching children and poring over reports of researchers around the world who were doing the same. He found, to put it most succinctly, that children don’t think like grownups. After thousands of interactions with young people often barely old enough to talk, Piaget began to suspect that behind their cute and seemingly illogical utterances were thought processes that had their own kind of order and their own special logic. Einstein called it a discovery “so simple that only a genius could have thought of it.” Piaget’s insight opened a new window into the inner workings of the mind. By the end of a wide-ranging and remarkably prolific research career that spanned nearly 75 years – from his first scientific publication at age 10 to work still in progress when he died at 84 – Piaget had developed several new fields of science: developmental psychology, cognitive theory and what came to be called genetic epistemology. Although not an educational reformer, he championed a way of thinking about children that provided the foundation for today’s education-reform movements. It was a shift comparable to the displacement of stories of “noble savages” and “cannibals” by modern anthropology. One might say that Piaget was the first to take children’s thinking seriously.

Others who shared this respect for children – John Dewey in the U.S., Maria Montessori in Italy and Paulo Freire in Brazil – fought harder for immediate change in the schools, but Piaget’s influence on education is deeper and more pervasive. He has been revered by generations of teachers inspired by the belief that children are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge (as traditional pedagogical theory had it) but active builders of knowledge – little scientists who are constantly creating and testing their own theories of the world. And though he may not be as famous as Sigmund Freud or even B.F. Skinner, his contribution to psychology may be longer lasting. As computers and the Internet give children greater autonomy to explore ever larger digital worlds, the ideas he pioneered become ever more relevant.

Piaget grew up near Lake Neuchatel in a quiet region of French Switzerland known for its wines and watches. His father was a professor of medieval studies and his mother a strict Calvinist. He was a child prodigy who soon became interested in the scientific study of nature. When, at age 10, his observations led to questions that could be answered only by access to the university library, Piaget wrote and published a short note on the sighting of an albino sparrow in the hope that this would influence the librarian to stop treating him like a child. It worked. Piaget was launched on a path that would lead to his doctorate in zoology and a lifelong conviction that the way to understand anything is to understand how it evolves.

After World War I, Piaget became interested in psychoanalysis. He moved to Zurich, where he attended Carl Jung’s lectures, and then to Paris to study logic and abnormal psychology. Working with Theodore Simon in Alfred Binet’s child-psychology lab, he noticed that Parisian children of the same age made similar errors on true-false intelligence tests. Fascinated by their reasoning processes, he began to suspect that the key to human knowledge might be discovered by observing how the child’s mind develops.

Emile Berliner

2012-01-05T01:34:00.000-08:00

JEmile Berliner invented the gramophone that provided the technology for recorded media in quantity.

He also improved Edison’s telephone by introducing a microphone. Emile (originally Emil) Berliner was born in Hanover, Germany, on May 20, 1851.

He was one of thirteen children born to Samuel and Sarah Fridman Berliner, two of whom died in infancy. His father was a merchant and a Talmudic scholar, and his mother was an amateur musician. From both parents Berliner and his siblings inherited a great sense of integrity and a pride in accomplishment.

Following a few years of school in Hanover, Berliner was sent to nearby Wolfenbuttel to attend the Samsonschule from which he graduated in 1865 at the age of fourteen. According to his own later statement, this marked the end of his formal schooling. Berliner then spent several years at odd jobs in Hanover helping to support the large Berliner family.

He first worked as a printer, then as a clerk in a fabric store. It was here that his talent as an inventor first came to surface. He invented a new loom for weaving cloth.

Enticed by the offer of a clerkship in a store partly owned by a man named Behrend, a Hanoverian who had emigrated to the United States some time earlier, and perhaps by a desire to escape the military duty that faced most young men in the year of the Franco-Prussian War, Berliner persuaded his parents to allow him to accept the job offer and to emigrate to America. In late March 1870 he left Hanover.

The dry-goods store for which he was destined was located in Washington, D.C. For three years Berliner clerked for Gotthelf, Behrend and Co. until in 1873 he decided a better opportunity awaited him in New York City. There Berliner again took up onerous jobs during the day while trying to improve himself by studying privately at night at the Cooper Institute.

After a brief career as a “drummer” (traveling salesman) for a “gents’ furnishings” (men’s clothing and accessories) establishment in Milwaukee, in 1875 Berliner again went back to New York where this time he was most fortunate in obtaining a position as general cleanup man in the laboratory of Constantine Fahlberg, the discoverer of saccharine. This experience in a research laboratory fired Berliner’s ambition, and he decided that science, research, and invention were to be his destiny.

Picture on the left shows the store in Washington where Berliner clerked as a young man.

In 1876 Berliner returned to what was now Behrend and Co. in Washington and resumed his clerkship. That was the year of the American centennial celebrations, and among the outstanding events that took place in Washington was a demonstration of the new telephone of Alexander Graham Bell. Berliner saw the instrument for the first time and was filled with enthusiasm. He commenced to study the telephone. He just wanted to make his own telephone. He spent much of his time at the library of the Cooper Institute where he took a keen interest in electricity and sound.

Dr. P. K. Iyengar

2012-01-05T01:32:00.000-08:00

Iyengar was trained in Canada working under Nobel laureate in Physics Bertram Neville Brockhouse, contributing to path-breaking research on lattice dynamics in germanium. Iyengar joined the Department of Atomic Energy in 1952 as a Junior Research Scientist, undertaking a wide variety of research in neutron scattering. At the DAE, he built up and headed the team of physicists and chemists that gained international recognition for their original research contributions in this field. In 1960s, he indigenously designed the PURNIMA reactor and headed the team that successfully commissioned the reactor in 1972 at BARC.

Operation Smiling Buddha

In 1971 he was transferred to Bhabha Atomic Research Centre where he was appointed the director of Physics Group (PG). He was one of the key scientist in the development of India's first nuclear device. The team, under Raja Ramanna tested the device under the code name Smiling Buddha. In 1974, Iyengar played a leading role in the Peaceful Nuclear Explosion at Pokharan-I, for which he was conferred the Padma Bhushan in 1975.
Career with Bhabha Atomic Research Centre

Iyengar took over as Director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in 1984. As Director, one of his first tasks was to take charge of the construction of the Dhruva reactor , the completion of which was then in question, and bring it to a successful conclusion under his leadership. Recognizing the importance of transferring newly developed technology from research institutes to industry, he introduced a Technology Transfer Cell at the BARC to assist and speed the process. He motivated basic research in fields ranging from molecular biology, to chemistry and material science. He nucleated new technologies like lasers and accelerators, which lead to the establishment of a new Centre for Advanced Technology, at Indore.

Chairman of Atomic Energy Commission of India

Iyengar was appointed Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India and Secretary to the Department of Atomic Energy in 1990. He was also appointed as Chairman of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India.

Under his leadership the Department of Atomic Energy vigorously pursued the nuclear power programme with the commissioning of two new power reactors at Narora and Kakrapar, and continued with the development of new reactor systems, such as liquid-sodium based fast reactors.

Equal emphasis was laid on enhanced production of heavy water, nuclear fuel and special nuclear materials. He also initiated proposals for the export of heavy-water, research reactors, hardware for nuclear applications to earn precious foreign exchange.

Gajendra Pal Singh Raghava

2012-01-05T01:31:00.000-08:00

Raghava was born in village Nagla Karan, Buland Shahr (UP), India in 1963. He did his B.Sc./M.Sc. from N.A.S. College, Meerut, UP in 1982. His major subjects were Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.

He did his M.Sc in Physics with specialization in electronics from N.A.S. College, Meerut, UP in 1984. He did his M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology (I.I.T.), New Delhi in 1986. In 1996 he received a doctorate in bioinformatics from Institute of Microbial Technology and Panjab University, Chandigarh.

His thesis was on "Computer Aided Prediction of Protein Conformation from Amino Acid Sequences of Biotechnological Relevance".

Career and Higher Studies

He joined the Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh in 1986 as a computer scientist and developer. He become head of the Bioinformatics Centre in 1994. He is also coordinator of the distributed information centre supported by DBT under the BTISNET programme, where his primary duty is to build and maintain infrastructure required for protein modeling and engineering.

He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford university as well as at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Cambridge for two years (1996–98). During this period he learned and developed a number of web servers for application in computational biology, particularly in protein modelling.

Achievements and Awards

Dr G P S Raghava receiving India Research Front Award 2009
Dr G P S Raghava receiving S. S. Bhatnagar Award from Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh
Dr G P S Raghava receiving National Bioscience Award from Science and Technology minister Shri Kapil Sibal

    Invited by University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), Little Rock, USA to establish Bioinformatics Dr Raghava has published more than 90 research papers in reputed journals, developed 7 currated databases and more than 80 web servers, and 30 copyrights.

    Raghava was a key figure in the development of the BioSuite software developed by TCS under NMITLI programmee, launched on the 14 July 2004.

    His group in collaboration with Biomantra, a private company, developed a software package VaxiPred: Computer aided vaccine design, which was launched by Director General, CSIR Dr R A Mashlekar on 15 December 2004.

Research interests

He developed a method for calculating concentration of antibodies and antigens from ELISA data, and he a prediction method for protein secondary structure prediction. In 1999 he established his research group at IMTECH with emphasis on protein structure prediction and genome annotation. In 2001, his group also focused on "Computer aided vaccine design" with emphasis on subunit vaccine design. Since 2006, his group is trying to integrate bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, pharmaco-informatics and clinical informatics in order to develop a single plate form for designing drugs in silico.

Web Services and Software

He is an adherent of public domain software or open source software, and his group both uses and develops free software for academic use. Recently his group have initiated a web portal Computational Resource for Drug Discovery (CRDD) under Open Source Drug Discovery . Services provided from his group can be broadly classified in the following categories.

Anil Kakodkar

2012-01-05T01:29:00.001-08:00

Anil Kakodkar is an eminent Indian nuclear scientist and mechanical engineer. He was the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India and the Secretary to the Government of India, he was the Director of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay from 1996-2000. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian honour, on January 26, 2009.

Champion of self-Reliance

Apart from playing a major role in India's nuclear tests asserting sovereignty, Dr. Kakodkar is a champion of India's self-reliance on Thorium as a fuel for nuclear energy.
Academic and Scientific Career

Kakodkar was born in 1943 (November 11, 1943), in Barwani Princely State (present day Madhya Pradesh state) to Mrs. Kamala Kakodkar & Mr. Purushottam Kakodkar, both Gandhian Freedom Fighters. He had his early education at Barwani and at Khargone, until moving to Mumbai for post-matriculation studies.
Higher Education

Kakodkar graduated from Ruparel College, then from VJTI, University of Mumbai with a degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1963. He joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in 1964. He obtained a masters degree in experimental stress analysis from the University of Nottingham in 1969.
Career in BARC

He joined the Reactor Engineering Division of the BARC and played a key role in design and construction of the Dhruva reactor, a completely original but high-tech project. He was a part of the core team of architects of India's Peaceful Nuclear Tests in 1974 and 1998. Further he has led the indigenous development in India's Pressurised Heavy Water Reactor Technology. His work in the rehabilitation of the two reactors at Kalpakkam and the first unit at Rawatbhata, which at one stage were on the verge of being written off, are examples of his engineering capability.

If Kakodkar's dream comes true, it will solve India's energy crisis.

Arun Netravali

2012-01-05T01:28:00.000-08:00

Arun Netravali, the man behind groundbreaking technological breakthroughs in digital technology like digital video research and high definition television, is an Indo-American technological whiz who revolutionized and redefined the way people perceive visual communications today. The former honcho of Bell Labs and chief scientist of Lucent Technologies, Netravali had pioneered several research and development works and had made significant contributions in the technology domain that has earned him a coveted status among his peers. However, that is not all to this technological stalwart. Behind his sharp techie brain, there lies a keen businessman and a leader who have inspired millions of minds with his pioneering feats. And even today, at the age of 65, this man continues to look forward to making many more such groundbreaking technologies to help transform human lives. An electrical engineer by profession, the long list of Netravali's breakthroughs in realms of digital technological advancement remains undefied. If you would like to know more about this Indian scientist of international acclaim, then trail down this biography below.

Early Life

Arun Netravali was born in Mumbai in the year 1946. After finishing school, he went on to graduate from IIT Mumbai. Later on, he moved to the U.S. to complete his M.S. and PhD from Rice University of Houston, Texas. Besides, Netravali holds the distinction of an honorary doctorate, conferred to him by the Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Career

Netravali worked in NASA in his initial years before making a big leap with Bell Laboratories. He also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University and Rutgers University for some time. He has authored over 170 technical research papers and co-authored "Digital Pictures: Representation and Compression and Digital Video: An introduction to MPEG-2 and Visual Communications Systems" with Barry G. Haskell. Considering his humungous contribution in the field of technology, Netravali was made the ninth president of one of the best high-tech labs of the world -the Bell Laboratories, in the year 1991. During this time, he was working as the Chief Scientist for Lucent Technologies where he created some of the most important technologies and claimed patent for 70 of them.

Contributions

In the year 1990, Netravali was elected as the leader of the research and development program for the HDTV or the high definition television. Today, most TV stations use a video encoder based on his work for their HDTV broadcasts. It was because of his contributions to digital technology that television was transformed from analog to digital.

Ashoke Sen

2012-01-05T01:27:00.000-08:00

Ashoke Sen (born 1956) is an Indian theoretical physicist. He has made a number of major original contributions to the subject of string theory, including his landmark paper on strong-weak coupling duality or S-duality,which was influential in changing the course of research in the field. He pioneered the study of unstable D-branes and made the famous Sen conjecture about open string tachyon condensation on such branes.His description of rolling tachyons has been influential in string cosmology. He has also co-authored many important papers on string field theory. One of his most recent contributions include the entropy function formalism for extremal black holes and its applications to attractors. His current research interests are centered around the attractor mechanism and the precision counting of microstates for black holes in string theory. Of his nearly 200 research papers, as many as 47 papers have over 100 citations each.

Sen, now above 50, received his bachelor’s of science degree in 1975 from Calcutta University, and his master’s three years later from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. He did his doctoral work in physics at Stony Brook University, where he graduated in 1982, subsequently spending the next three years as a post-doc at Fermilab and another two and a half at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). In March 1988, he moved back to India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Since 1995 he has been a full professor at the Harish-Chandra Research Institute. Between 1998 and 2003, Sen visited the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, U.K., as Rothschild Visiting Professor, and, between 2004 and 2005, was at MIT as Morningstar Visiting Professor. He is married to Dr. Sumathi Rao, a condensed matter physicist at HRI.

Sen was awarded the ICTP Prize in 1989 the S.S. Bhatnagar award in 1994 and the Padma Shri in 2001. In 1998 Sen was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.

The Outlook magazine of April 23, 2007 has listed him amongst India's 25 people who will not make it to the power list, yet have made significant contributions to society.

He is also the recipient of the Infosys Prize in the Mathematical Sciences for the year 2009.

Horace Benedict de Saussure

2012-01-05T01:25:00.000-08:00

JHorace-Benedict de Saussure was Swiss physicist, geologist, and early Alpine explorer who also developed probably the first electrometer, a device for measuring electric potential by means of attraction or repulsion of charged bodies.

The Saussure family, whose fame has spread in Geneva, as it has abroad, came originally from Lorraine. They sought refuge in Geneva at the time of Calvin’s reform and were accepted into the bourgeoise in 1635. Several of his sons’ names passed into posterity. Nicolas (1709-1790) shone in agronomy, Nicolas-Theodore (1767-1845) in chemistry and his son Henri (1829-1905) in entomology. But the best known were Horace-Benedict (1740-1799) and Ferdinand (1857-1913).

Horace-Benedict de Saussure was Swiss physicist, geologist and meteorolgist. He was born in Conches, close to Geneva, on February 17, 1740. In 1746, six years old, he entered the public school of Geneva. In 1754 he continiued education in the Academy (University) of Geneva. In 1759, 19 years old, Horace-Benedict de Saussure completed his studies at the Academy, by presenting one Dissertatio physica of igne. In 1762 he became professor of philosophy and natural sciences at the Academy in Geneva (of which he was rector in 1774-1775), where he founded Societe pour le Avancement des Arts. In May 1765 Horace-Benedict de Saussure married Albertine Boissier.

The first true electrometer, a device for measuring electric potential by means of attraction or repulsion of charged bodies, came from Horace-Benedict de Saussure who placed in 1766 the strings and balls inside an inverted glass jar and added a printed scale so that the distance or angle between the balls could be measured. It was de Saussure who discovered the distance between the balls was not linearly related to the amount of charge.

Later Saussure used his electrometer for various experiments with electricity. For example, the results published by Volta fired up de Saussure`s enthusiasm to investigate electricity from evaporation. His first experiment in 1786 involved throwing red hot iron into an insulated coffee pot containing water. His results were opposite to those obtained by Volta.

Kotcherlakota Rangadhama Rao

2012-01-05T01:24:00.000-08:00

Prof. Kotcherlakota Rangadhama Rao, (9 September 1898–20 June 1972) was an Indian physicist in the field of Spectroscopy.

Rangadhama Rao is best known for his work on Spectroscopy, his role in the development of Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance (NQR), and his long association with Physics labs of Andhra University. In his later years, he became known for his position as the Principal of all the colleges of Andhra University before their divisions into separate colleges, viz., AU College of Arts and Commerce, AU College of Engineering, AU College of Law, AU College of Pharmacy and AU College of Science and Technology.

Over the course of his life, Prof. K. Rangadhama Rao was known both for his scientific ability and his interpersonal relations and volatile personality

Kotcherlakota Rangadhama Rao was born in Vizianagaram, a coastal town in present-day Vizianagaram district of state of Andhra Pradesh, India, on 9 September 1898. His mother tongue was Telugu. His father, Kotcherlakota Venkata Narsing Rao (1860–1928), who belonged to the Hindu Brahmin community, was the Post Master of the present-day cities of Vizianagaram, Gajapathinagaram and Visakhapatnam, then small cities in the state of Andhra Pradesh in the Madras Presidency of British India. His paternal grandfather and grandmother were Venkata Ramaswamy and Mallampalli Bangaramma. His mother, Ramayamma, a Hindu, died in the year 1923 in Trichiniopoly, the present-day Tiruchirappalli in the state of Tamil Nadu. Growing up with a devout mother, a strict father and the Hindu traditions of the region, the young Rangadhama Rao had the influences that would play an important role in his adult life; these included compassion for sentient beings and vegetarianism.

Edwin Howard Armstrong

2012-01-05T01:22:00.001-08:00

Edwin H. Armstrong is widely regarded as one of the foremost contributors to the field of radio-electronics. Radio’s premier inventor, Edwin H. Armstrong was responsible for the Regenerative Circuit (1912), the Superheterodyne Circuit (1918), the Superregenerative Circuit (1922) and the complete frequency-modulation radio broadcasting system (1933).

These basic electronic circuits are underlying all modern radio, radar, and television. Armstrong was the holder of 42 patents for inventions in the field of radio. His inventions and developments form the backbone of Radio Communications as we know it. Edwin H. Armstrong was born on December 18, 1890, in New York City, where he was to spend much of his professional career. Armstrong was from a genteel, devoutly Presbyterian family of Manhattan. He was the first child in the family.

His mother, Emily Smith Armstrong, had been a teacher in the public schools and his father, John Armstrong, was vice president of the United States branch of the Oxford University Press. The family soon moved to the suburban town of Yonkers, N.Y., where they lived in a house on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. The house, which still stands just up from the Greystone railroad station, was declared a historical landmark in 1978 by the Yonkers Historical Society.

Next door, on the north side of the house at the corner of Odell Avenue, was 1040 Warburton Avenue, the home of Armstrong’s maternal grandparents. The members of the two families were a gregarious lot, and Edwin’s childhood was a happy one filled with large gatherings of relatives, many of whom were teachers. Learning was prized. “Quick, boy! How much is nine times five, minus three, divided by six, times two, plus nine?” His great uncle, Charles Hartman, principal of New York City Public School 160 would quiz his nephew to encourage his mental agility.

Armstrong was a shy boy interested from childhood in engines, railway trains, and all mechanical contraptions. Armstrong decided to become an inventor when he was fourteen and began filling his bedroom with a clutter of homemade wireless gear. His imagination was fired by the Boy’s Book of Inventions and by Guglielmo Marconi, who a few years before had sent the first wireless signals across the Atlantic. But wireless telegraphy was still in a primitive state.

Its crude spark-gap transmitters produced electromagnetic wave signals so weak that sunlight washed them out through most daytime hours, while its iron-filing or magnetic receivers were cruder still, requiring tight earphones and quiet rooms to catch the faint Morse code signals that were all the early wireless was capable of transmitting. Armstrong joined in the hunt for improved instruments. Armstrong built a maze of wireless apparatus in his family’s attic and began the solitary, secretive work that absorbed his life. Except for a passion for tennis and, later, for fast motor cars, he developed no other significant interests.

Homi Jehangir Bhabha

2012-01-05T01:19:00.000-08:00

Homi Jehangir Bhabha was born in an aristocratic family in Bombay on October 30, 1909. As the son of a barrister he grew up in an environment where education held great importance.

He passed the Senior Cambridge Examination when he was sixteen, and went to Cambridge to attain a degree in Mechanical Engineering in Gonvile and Caius College. He was greatly influenced by his mathematics teacher, Paul Dirac, and was initiated into the fascinating world of mathematics and theoretical physics.

Armed with a honours degree in 1930, he began research at the Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge. His first paper was published in 1933 which was followed by many more. He received his PhD in 1935 and continued to stay in Cambridge until 1939.

During this period he travelled to Europe and met scientists like Neil Bohr, Pauli and Fermi among others. Bhabha was in India, when the war broke out in Europe and this marked the beginning of his career in India.

In 1940, on the behest of C V Raman, head of the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore, Bhabha joined the institute as a Reader in Physics. He was elected as a member of the Royal Society in 1942. Later he was elected a Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, and in 1943, became the President of the Physics section of the Indian Science Congress.

Bhabha, aware of the importance of translating theory into experiments, began putting his knowledge in the practical study of Cosmic Rays.

Realising the need for an institute fully devoted to fundamental research, he, helped with funds from J R D Tata, established the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Bombay in 1945.

Bhabha was soon a force to reckon with in the international science circles as his studies in the field of Atomic Energy were considered of great importance.

He served as the President of the United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, in Geneva in 1955 and as President of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 1960-1963.

Louis Leakey

2012-01-05T01:12:00.000-08:00

Louis Leakey’s enthusiasm for Africa and the search for earliest man were infectious. Speaking before a packed lecture hall in his staccato-like voice, punctuated by rapid inhales, he cast a spell, making each listener believe he was speaking only to him or her.

His following in America was cultlike. Consumed with devotion and swept up in his charisma, many developed a desire to follow somehow in his footsteps, to please him. No wonder Leakey became the patriarch of a family that dominated anthropology as no family has dominated a scientific field before or since. Not only did Louis, his wife Mary and their second son Richard make the key discoveries that shaped our understanding of human origins, but they also inspired a generation of researchers (myself included) to pick up where they left off.

I recall with great fondness my first visit to Nairobi in 1970 when Louis ceremoniously led me to the room housing the crown jewels of human evolution. Every fossil took on a mythical cast as he waxed eloquent about how it revealed some magic moment of our origins. Here he was, the grand master, sharing his passion, knowledge and intuition with a new disciple. He was often like that: generous, open, supportive, always trying to win new converts to his way of working, his way of interpreting the past.

Born in Kenya of English missionaries, Louis was initiated by tribal elders into the native Kikuyu society. As a young man he was adventurous, impulsive, driven, ruggedly handsome and romantically African. Fresh out of Cambridge, Louis set out to prove Darwin’s theory that Africa was humankind’s homeland–and to discover evidence for his own belief that true man, Homo, had a very ancient origin.

In 1933, when Louis met and fell in love with 20-year-old Mary Nicol, he already had a family, but in flagrant disregard of the social norms of the time, he divorced. The synergy of Louis and Mary’s union was obvious from the outset. In contrast to Louis’ charming, gregarious, outgoing nature, Mary was shy, reserved, socially uncomfortable and, in her own words, not very fond of other people. Mary preferred to carefully evaluate scientific evidence before reaching any conclusions; Louis, on the other hand, was often impulsive and cavalier in his proclamations. Rigorous in her approach, intensely focused and remarkably diligent, Mary quickly set new standards in the study of African prehistory, culminating in her stunning monographs on the archaeology of Olduvai Gorge.

It was Mary’s 1959 discovery of the Zinjanthropus cranium at Olduvai that captured worldwide attention and made the Leakeys a household name. Building on this find, Louis and Mary attracted a multidisciplinary team of specialists to work at Olduvai and launched the modern science of paleoanthropology, the study of human origins.

M.a.Padmanabha Rao

2012-01-05T00:48:00.000-08:00

Discovery of Bharat Radiation and UV dominant optical radiation emissions from Radioisotopes and XRF sources

BHARAT RADIATION (DARK RADIATION, a new Electromagnetic radiation at eV level.

    * Essentially, two more emissions were reported from radioisotopes and XRF sources. Gamma, X-ray and beta emissions are successively followed by Bharat radiation and UV dominant optical emission from one and the same excited atom of radioisotopes or XRF source by a previously unknown atomic phenomenon.

    * Bharat radiation is significant to X-ray physics, nuclear physics, atomic spectroscopy, and Solar Physics.

    * Bharat Radiation and the UV dominant optical radiation emissions from radioisotopes and XRF sources join the list of emissions: gamma, X-ray, and beta.

    * Experimental evidence to the predicted Bharat Radiation from solar spectrum: Solar XUV is identified as Bharat Radiation emission from radioisotopes produced by uranium fission

CAREER

Professor of Medical Physics, Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences, Jolly Grant, Uttaranchal, India (2001)

Head, Radiation Safety Group & Deputy Director (Sc.E), Defence Laboratory, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India (1983-‘97)

Lecturer in Medical Physics, Department of Nuclear Medicine, All India Institute of Medical Sciences , New Delhi (1964-1983).

CURRENT ADDRESS : 114 Charak Sadan, Vikaspuri, New Delhi 110018, India. raomap@yahoo.com; Mobile: +91-9871257964
Memento presented by World Federation of Nuclear Medicine and Biology, 1974

HONORS and AWARDS

* Slashdot Poll predicted “Bharat Radiation” might get Nobel Prize after Medicine in 2008: Slashdot Poll | Nobel Prize For Medicine Awarded, Physics ... Oct 6, 2008 – Which discovery deserves the Nobel Prize for Physics this year?

    * Represented India as Assembly Member to the World Federation of Nuclear Medicine and Biology, Tokyo, 1974 and led Indian team of scientists and doctors at the age of 37.

    * Presided an Instrumentation session during First World Congress in Nuclear Medicine held at the same time wherein presented a paper on "scatter photon imaging techniques", while working at AIIMS.

QUALIFICATIONS

    * PhD. (AIIMS) Degree from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences , New Delhi in 1975

Mani Lal Bhaumik

2012-01-05T00:46:00.000-08:00

Mani Lal Bhaumik is an Indian-born American physicist. He has been an author, lecturer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist.

His early contributions to laser technology are exemplified by the development of the excimer laser at the Northrop Corporation Research and Technology Center in Los Angeles. As team leader, Dr. Bhaumik announced the successful demonstration of the world's first efficient excimer laser at the Denver, Colorado meeting of the Optical Society of America in May 1973. Subsequently, it found extensive use as the type of laser that made possible the immensely popular Lasik corrective eye surgery, eliminating the need for glasses or contact lenses in many cases. In recognition of his pioneering research in high energy lasers and new laser systems, Dr. Bhaumik has been elected by his peers to fellowships in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers as well as of the American Physical Society.

Dr. Bhaumik's current interest is in sharing with the public the advances in quantum physics and cosmology and their implications for both material and spiritual development.

He was given one of India's prestigious civilian award - Padma Shri - in 2011.

Bhaumik was born in a small village in Tamluk, Medinipore, West Bengal India, and thrust into the vortex of the struggle for Indian independence. Education provided him a way out of poverty. He walked four miles barefoot to the nearest school, and endured famine, flood, and armed threat. As an impressionable teenager, He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Scottish Church College and an M. Sc. from the University of Calcutta. He won the attention of Satyendra Nath Bose (co-creator of the Bose-Einstein Statistics) who encouraged his prodigious curiosity. Bhaumik became the first student to receive Ph.D. degree from the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) at Kharagpur in history when he received his Ph.D. in Quantum Physics in the year 1958.[1] His thesis was on Resonant Electronic Energy Transfers, a subject he would have cause to use in his work with lasers.

Receiving a Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1959, Dr. Bhaumik came to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) for post doctoral studies. In 1961, he joined the Quantum Electronics Division at Xerox Electro-Optical Systems in Pasadena and began his career as a laser scientist. Concurrently, he taught Quantum physics and Astronomy at the California State University at Long Beach. In 1968, he was enlisted by the Northrop Corporate Research Laboratory, where he rose to become the director of the Laser Technology Laboratory and led the team responsible for the development of the excimer laser technology. Dr. Bhaumik announced the successful demonstration of the world's first efficient excimer laser at the Denver, Colorado meeting of the Optical Society of America in May 1973. The application of this class of laser in the patented Lasik eye surgery would eventually eliminate the need for glasses or contact lenses in many cases.

Dr. Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan

2012-01-05T00:44:00.000-08:00

Dr. Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan is a space scientist based in Bangalore, Karnataka who headed the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) for more than 9 years until 2003. He was a Member in the Upper House (Rajya Sabha,2003–2009) of the Indian Parliament.

He is now a Member of the Planning Commission of Government of India, He is also the Chairman of Karnataka Knowledge Commission .[1] He is also the Director of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, since April 2004. He is a recipient of the three civilian awards from the Government of India: the Padma Shri (1982), Padma Bhushan (1992) and Padma Vibhushan (2000).

Dr. Kasturirangan was responsible for directing the Indian Space programme for over 9 years, as Chairman of ISRO and the Space Commission and as Secretary to the Government of India in the Department of Space, before laying down office on 27 August 2003.
He was earlier the Director of ISRO Satellite Centre, overseeing the development of new generation spacecraft, the Indian National Satellite (INSAT-2) and the Indian Remote SensingSatellites (IRS-1A and 1B) as well as scientific satellites.

He was also the Project Director for India's first two experimental earth observation satellites, Bhaskara-I and II.

Under his leadership, the programme witnessed several major milestones including the successful launching and operationalisation of the India's prestigious launch vehicles, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle and the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle.

Studies on the advanced version of the GSLV, GSLVMk-III, was also completed including defining its full configuration.

Further, he also oversaw the development and launching of some of the world's best civilian remote sensing satellites, IRS-1C and 1D, realization of new generation INSAT communication satellites, besides ocean observation satellites IRS-P3/P4. He also lead the initiative for India to enter the planetary exploration era by an extensive studies leading to the definition of Chandrayaan-I.

These efforts have put India as a pre-eminent space-faring nation among the handful of six countries that have major space programmes. As an Astrophysicist, Dr. Kasturirangan's interest include research in high energy X-ray and gamma ray astronomy as well as optical astronomy.

Defining India’s most ambitious space based High Energy Astronomy observatory and initiating a related activities was also an important milestone under his leadership. He has made extensive and significant contributions to studies of Cosmic x-ray and gamma ray sources and effect of cosmic x-rays in the lower atmosphere.

Dr. Kasturirangan graduated in Science with Honours, and obtained his Master of Science degree in Physics, from Bombay University. He received his Doctorate Degree in Experimental High Energy Astronomy in 1971, working at the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad.

As an Astrophysicist, Dr. Kasturirangan's research interests include high energy X-ray and gamma ray astronomy as well as optical astronomy.

He has published more than 244 papers, in international and national journals, in the areas of astronomy, space science and space applications.

Dr. Kasturirangan is a member of several important scientific academies and educational institutions, both within India and abroad.