C.V. Raman

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born on 7 November 1888 in Tiruchirappalli, in what is now Tamil Nadu, India, and died on 21 November 1970 in Bangalore. Largely self-taught in physics while working as a government financial officer in Calcutta, he pursued research at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in his spare time before becoming a full-time physics professor. In 1928 he discovered that a small fraction of light scattered by a transparent medium changes wavelength in a way that reveals the vibrational structure of the medium's molecules, now called the Raman effect; he was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery, becoming the first Asian and the first person from a country outside Europe or North America to win a Nobel Prize in a science. In 1933 he moved to Bangalore to head the physics department at the Indian Institute of Science, serving as its first Indian director until 1937, and in 1948 he founded and directed the Raman Research Institute there for the rest of his life.