Dr. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (C. V. Raman) Life History

Dr. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (C. V. Raman) Life History

Dr. C.V Raman's full name is Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. He was born on November 7th, 1888, and passed away on November 21st, 1970. He was an accomplished Indian physicist who made his name in the area of light scattering. Together with K. S. Krishnan, a student of his, he discovered that some of the light that is deflected changes in wavelength and amplitude when it passes through a transparent medium. The Raman Effect, also known as Raman scattering, was eventually given to this novel phenomena of light scattering. Raman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930. He was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field.

Raman was a brilliant child for his Hindu Tamil Brahmin parents. He was an intelligent and gifted student from an early age. He graduated from St. Aloysius' Anglo-Indian High School with his secondary education at the age of 11 and his higher secondary education at the age of 13. At the age of 16, he graduated with honours in physics from Presidency College and won first place in the University of Madras' bachelor's degree exams. While working toward his diploma in 1906, he wrote his first academic article on the diffraction of light. He earned an M.A. in Physics the following year, in 1907.

His father’s name was Chandrasekhara Ramanathan Iyer was his father’s name who was a lecturer in Physics and Mathematics in a college in Vishakhapatnam. His mother’s name was Parvathi Ammal. He married Lokasundari Ammal in the year 1907 and had two sons namely Radhakrishnan and Chandrasekhar.

He took the Financial Civil Services (FCS) test and passed it because of his father's desire. He moved to Kolkata in 1907 and began working there as the Assistant Accountant General. In his free time, he visited the Indian Association for Cultivation of Sciences' research facility. Even though his job was extremely busy, he continued his research work at night because science was his primary passion.

Despite the restricted resources in the lab, he persisted in his research and published the results in a number of prestigious international journals, such as "The Philosophical Magazine," "Nature," "Physics Review," etc. He concentrated his studies at the time on the topics of vibrations and acoustics.

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