This is the first volume of a set of two volumes. It comprises a collection of scientists’ lives, their struggles, their achievements and their laurels. The scientists have been grouped under five disciplines—Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Life Sciences. The reader meets people from various backgrounds—those with insufficient schooling, those with little money, those born into aristocracy, those with science in their blood, those battling with grave illnesses, those who moved from one discipline to another (as different as possible from each other); ultimately culminating in path-breaking scientific discoveries. The aim of these brief biographical sketches is to inspire a wider audience to take up the noble pursuit of pure sciences.
Dr R Parthasarathy graduated in Physics from St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchirapalli. He obtained his Engineering degree (D.I.I.Sc) from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and his Ph.D in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Roorkee (now IIT Roorkee).
Engineering Appleton, Edward Arago, Jean Babbage, Charles Baird, John Callendar, Hugh Carnot, Sadi Cotton, Arthur Diesel, Rudolf Esaki, Leo Faraday, Michael Fulton, Robert Giaever, Ivar Haber, Fritz Haggerty, Patrick Heaviside, Oliver Henry, Joseph Hertz, Heinrich Karman, Theodore von Kelvin, Lord Krupp, Alfred Langmuir, Irving Marconi, Guglielmo Ohain, Hans von Shannon, Claude Taylor, G.I. Terzaghi, Karl Tesla, Nicola Steinmetz, Charles Stephenson, George Watt, James Whittle, Frank Zworykin, Vladimir
Physics Becquerel, Henri Bohr, Niels Boltzmann, Ludwig Born, Max Bragg, Lawrence Bragg, William Cavendish, Henry Chadwick, James Coulomb, Charles Crookes, William Dirac, Paul Doppler, Christian Fermi, Enrico Foucault, Jean Fraunhofer, Joseph Fresnel, August Heisenberg, Werner Helmholtz, Hermann Huygens, Christian Kapitza, Peter Mach, Ernst Millikan, Robert Pauli, Wolfgang Peltier, Jean Charles Planck, Max Raman, C.V. Roentgen, William Rutherford, Ernst Stefan, Josef van der Waals, Johannes Wien, Wilhelm Young, Thomas
Mathematics Abel, Henrik Bessel, Friedrich Boole, George Bradley, James Cantor, Georg Cauchy, Augustin Chandrasekar, S. Descartes, Rene Erdos, Paul Euler, Leonhard Fourier, Joseph Galois, Evariste Gauss, Carl Halley, Edmund Hawking, Stephen Hilbert, David Herschel, John Herschel, William Lagrange, Joseph Laplace, Pierre Leibniz, Gottfried Pascal, Blaise Poincare, Henri Ramachandra, Yasudas Ramanujan, Srinivasa Riemann, Bernhard Wiener, Norbert
Chemistry Arrhenius, Svante Avogadro, Amedeo Berthollet, Claude Berzelius, Jacob Black, Joseph Bunsen, Robert Dalton, John Dulong, Pierre Fourcroy, Antoine Gay-Lussac, Joseph Hodgkin, Dorothy Hofmann, August von Joliot-Curie, Irene Kekule, Friederich Lavoisier, Antoine Liebig, Justus von Mendeleev, Dmitri Perkin, William Ramsay, William Travers, Morris
Life Science Ali, Salim Darwin, Charles Freud, Sigmund Ehrlich, Paul Einthoven, Willem Haller, Albrecht von Harvey, William Leeuwenhoek, Antony von Pavlov, Ivan Ramachandran, G.N. Wallace, Alfred Woehler, Friedrich
In science, a spectacular achievement is remembered but the foundation on which the achievement was based is often forgotten; Dr Parthasarathy reminds us of this basic fact. The scientists selected by the author span several centuries and almost all the persons who laid the foundation of modern science and built its edifice are there. This is a store-house of information, there is almost nothing in it, which is not interesting.