Raman, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata

Raman, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata (chŭn`drəsĕkärə vĕng`kətə rä`mən), 1888–1970, Indian physicist. He was professor of physics at Calcutta Univ. from 1917 to 1933. In Bangalore (Bengaluru) he directed the Indian Institute of Science and, from 1946, the Raman Institute. For his research on the diffusion of light and for his discovery of the Raman effect, he received the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is noted also for his studies of diamonds. In 1929 he was knighted.

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Raman, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata

(born Nov. 7, 1888, Trichinopoly, India—died Nov. 21, 1970, Bangalore) Indian physicist influential in the growth of science in India. He received a Nobel Prize in 1930 for discovering that when light passes through a transparent material, some of the light that emerges at a right angle to the original beam is of other frequencies (Raman frequencies) characteristic of the material. He contributed to the building up of nearly every Indian research institution in his time, founded a scholarly physics journal and an academy of sciences, and trained hundreds of students.