Satyendra Nath Bose

In News

• The 129th birth anniversary of Satyendra Nath Bose was observed.

About Satyendra Nath Bose

• Early life: Born on January 1, 1894, He grew up and studied in Kolkata, where he solidified his position as an exemplary academician. 
  • His father, an accountant in the Executive Engineering Department of the East Indian Railways, gave him an arithmetic problem to solve every day before going to work, encouraging Bose’s interest in mathematics.
• Educational Career:
  • By the age of 15, he began pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree at the Presidency College and later finished his MSc in Mixed Mathematics in 1915. 
  • At 22, Bose was appointed lecturer at Calcutta University, along with astrophysicist Meghnad Saha. 
    • By the end of 1917, Bose began giving lectures on physics. 
    • In 1921, he joined the then-newly created Dacca University as Reader in Physics. 
    • It was here while teaching that he documented his findings in a report called Planck’s Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta. 
      • Even though his research was rejected by a journal, he decided to mail his paper to Albert Einstein.
      • Einstein recognised the significance of Bose’s theory and generalised it to a wider range of phenomena, and the theory came to be known as Bose-Einstein statistics.
• The Breakthrough: Indian mathematician and physicist noted for his collaboration with Albert Einstein in developing a theory regarding the gaslike qualities of electromagnetic radiation.
  • He also joined the laboratory of Maurice de Broglie where he learnt techniques of X-ray spectroscopy and crystallography, the branch of science that deals with the arrangement of atoms in crystalline solids.
• Return to India: After his stay in Europe, Bose came back to India and was appointed professor of physics and then Head of Department at Dhaka University in 1927. 
  • Here, he completely devoted himself to teaching and guiding research.
  • He designed equipment for setting up an X-ray crystallography laboratory at the university, and wrote several papers on a range of subjects, such as ‘D2 Statistics’, and ‘Total Reflection of Electromagnetic Waves in the Ionosphere’.
  •  He retired from the University of Calcutta in 1956 and spent a year as the Vice Chancellor at the Viswa-Bharati University.
• Awards to honour him
  • His contributions to physics were recognised by the Indian government by awarding him the Padma Vibhushan, one of the highest civilian awards in the country. 
  • He was also appointed as National Professor, the highest honour in India for scholars.
  • In honour of Bose’s legacy, any particle that obeys the Bose-Einstein statistics is called a boson. 
    • His theory is a cornerstone of condensed matter physics.
  • He lived the remainder of his life in Kolkata, until his death in 1974.

Source: IE