biography of cv raman

1. BIOGRAPHY
Sir C. V. Raman
By
Nikhil Kumar

2. Childhood & Family details….
 Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born
on 7 November1888 in Tiruchirapalli ,
Madras.
 He was second child of Chandrasekhara
Ramanathan Iyer and Parvathi Ammal.
 His father was a teacher at a local high
school, and earned a modest income.
 In 1892, his family moved
to Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh as his
father was appointed to the faculty of
physics at Mrs A.V. Narasimha Rao College.
 He married Lokasundari Ammal on 6 May
1907.

3. Raman’s education….
 Raman was educated at the St Aloysius' Anglo-Indian High
School, Visakhapatnam.
 He passed matriculation at age 11.
 He secured first position in Examination in Arts examination
(equivalent to today's intermediate examination, pre-
university course) with a scholarship at age 13.
 He secured first position in the Andhra Pradesh school board
examination.
 In 1902, Raman joined Presidency College in Madras where
his father had been transferred to teach mathematics and
physics. In 1904, he obtained a B.A. degree from
the University of Madras, where he stood first and won the
gold medals in physics and English.

4. Research begins….
 Raman qualified for the Indian Finance Service achieving first
position in the entrance examination in February 1907.
 He was posted in Calcutta (now Kolkata) as Assistant Accountant
General in June 1907.
 With the support of Asutosh Dey , who would eventually become his
lifelong collaborator, Amrita Lal Sircar, founder and secretary of
IACS, and Ashutosh Mukherjee , executive member of the institute
and Vice-Chancellor he obtained permission to conduct research at
IACS in his own time even "at very unusual hours," as Raman later
reminisced.
 Raman's article "Newton's rings in polarised light" published
in Nature in 1907 became the first from the institute.

5. Raman’s discovery….
 Musical sound
One of Raman's interests was on the scientific basis of
musical sounds.He worked out the theory
of transverse vibration of bowed string instruments based
on superposition of velocities. One of his earliest studies
was on the wolf tone in violins and cellos. He studied
the acoustics of various violin and related instruments,
including Indian stringed instruments, and water splashes.
 Blue colour of the sea
Raman, in his broadening venture on optics, started to
investigate scattering of light starting in 1919. His first
phenomenal discovery of the physics of light was the blue
colour of seawater. Using simple optical equipment, a
pocket-sized spectroscope and a Nicol prism in hand, he
studied the seawater. He described how the sea appears
even more blue than usual, contradicting Rayleigh.

6.  Raman effect
Raman's second important discovery on the scattering of
light was a new type of radiation, an eponymous
phenomenon called the Raman effect. After discovering the
nature of light scattering that caused blue colour of water, he
focused on the principle behind the phenomenon. His
experiments in 1923 showed the possibility of other light
rays formed in addition to incident ray when sunlight was
filtered through a violet glass in certain liquids and solids.
Ramanathan believed that this was a case of a "trace
of fluorescence." In 1925, K. S. Krishnan, his Research
Associate, noted the theoretical background for the
existence of an additional scattering line beside the usual
polarised elastic scattering when light scatters through
liquid.He referred to the phenomenon as "feeble
fluorescence”. He employed the instrument
using monochromatic light from a mercury arc lamp which
penetrated transparent material and was allowed to fall on a
spectrograph to record its spectrum. The lines of scattering
could now be measured and photographed. The same day,
Raman made the announcement before the press.

7. Awards ….
 In 1912, Raman received the Curzon
Research Award.
 In 1913, he received the Woodburn Research
Medal.
 In 1928, he received the Matteucci Medal.
 In 1930, he won the Nobel Prize in
Physics "for his work on the scattering of light
and for the discovery of the effect named after
him.He was the first Asian and first non-white
to receive any Nobel Prize in the sciences. In
1930, he received the Hughes Medal of the
Royal Society.
 In 1941, he was awarded the Franklin Medal.
 In 1954, he was awarded the Bharat Ratna.
 In 1957, he was awarded the Lenin Peace
Prize.

8. Death….
 At the end of October 1970, Raman had a cardiac
arrest and collapsed in his laboratory. He was moved to
the hospital where doctors diagnosed his condition and
declared that he would not survive another four hours. He
however survived a few days and requested to stay in the
gardens of his institute surrounded by his followers.
 Two days before Raman died, he told one of his former
students, "Do not allow the journals of the Academy to
die, for they are the sensitive indicators of the quality of
science being done in the country and whether science is
taking root in it or not." That evening, Raman met with the
Board of Management of his institute in his bedroom and
discussed with them the fate of the institute's
management. He also willed his wife to perform a
simple cremation without any rituals upon his death. He
died from natural causes early the next morning on 21
November 1970 at the age of 82.

9. THANK YOU 