CV Raman's Death Anniversary: 10 Facts about India's Nobel Laureate

Indian physicist Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, popularly known as CV Raman, was a Nobel laureate who discovered a new phenomenon of the scattering of light, known as the Raman Effect.

Raman was born on November 7, 1888 and passed away on November 21, 1970 at the age of 82 due to cardiac arrest. On his death anniversary, let us take a look at some of the facts about the second Nobel laureate from India:

· He was born in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchirapalli to a teacher Chandrasekhara Ramanathan Iyer and his wife Parvathi Ammal. Raman was their second child. He had seven siblings.

· He received education from Presidency College, Madras. He passed B.A exams in 1904, obtaining a gold medal in Physics.

· The physicist joined the Indian Finance Department in 1907, but took time out from his job to carry out experiments at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science at Calcutta.

· In 1917, CV Raman accepted the Palit Chair of Physics at the Calcutta University. Palit Chair of Physics is a Physics professorship offered at the university.

· He found the peer-reviewed journal called India Journal of Physics in 1926. In its second volume, he published the article ‘The New Radiation’ reporting the discovery of the Raman Effect.

· Raman was not alone in his experiment. His co-researcher was K S Krishnan. It is said that Raman had stressed on Krishnan’s contribution in his Nobel acceptance speech.

· CV Raman became the first Asian and Indian to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Before him, only one Indian won Nobel Prize — Rabindranath Tagore for Literature.

· He once shared that his inspiration for the discovery of the optical theory was the “wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea.”

· Apart from the Nobel Prize, he received other awards and recognitions for his work. He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society and was knighted in 1929.

· Not only optics, Raman also studied acoustics. He studied the harmonic nature of Indian musical instruments, such as tabla.

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