Raman was a physicist. In 1928 he found that light changes its wavelength when it scatters from molecules. Scientists call this the Raman effect. He was the first Asian to get a Nobel Prize in a science subject.

Life and work

Raman worked as a government accountant in Calcutta and did research in his free time. In 1917 he became a professor of physics at the University of Calcutta. In 1933 he became the first Indian director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In 1948 he started the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore.

Publications

• A new type of secondary radiation (with K. S. Krishnan), Nature, 1928. The first report of the Raman effect.
• A new radiation, Indian Journal of Physics, 1928. The link goes to the 1953 reprint in Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences.
• The molecular scattering of light, Nobel lecture, 1930.

Known associates

• K. S. Krishnan, co-author of the 1928 discovery

Awards

• Fellow of the Royal Society (1924). (List of Fellows, 1924)
• Nobel Prize in Physics (1930). (NobelPrize.org)
• Bharat Ratna (1954). (List of recipients)
• Lenin Peace Prize (1957). (List of recipients)

Controversies

• K. S. Krishnan did the experiments with Raman, but he did not share the Nobel Prize. Historians of science discuss how much credit Krishnan must get. (Source)
• In 1928 the Soviet physicists Grigory Landsberg and Leonid Mandelstam saw the same effect in crystals. They did not get a share of the Nobel Prize. (Source)

Sources

• Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, 1888–1970, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1971
• Biographical page, NobelPrize.org
• C. V. Raman, Wikipedia