Tech & Innovation

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a self-taught mathematician from Erode who produced thousands of original results in number theory, infinite series and continued fractions, nearly unknown until he wrote to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge in 1913.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at thirty-one, he worked and published with Hardy until illness brought him home to India. He died in 1920, aged thirty-two.

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was a physicist and biologist from Bengal who demonstrated that plants respond to stimulus in ways that resemble animal nerves, measuring growth with instruments of his own design, including the crescograph.

He lectured on wireless waves in London in 1895 and was knighted in 1917. He founded the Bose Institute in Calcutta, which opened its doors to researchers of every nationality.

Nandan Nilekani is a co-founder of the technology firm Infosys and later served as its chairman. He led the Unique Identification Authority of India, which built Aadhaar, the world’s largest digital identity programme.

He has since worked on digital public infrastructure with governments and foundations, and his books trace how technology reaches ordinary citizens at population scale.

Satyendra Nath Bose was an Indian theoretical physicist whose 1924 paper on photon statistics founded quantum statistics. Albert Einstein extended the work, and particles obeying it are named bosons in his honour.

Largely self-taught in the new quantum mechanics, he taught at the universities of Dacca and Calcutta for more than three decades and received the Padma Vibhushan in 1954.

Dr. Vikram Sarabhai was an Indian physicist and astronomer who founded the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad and set up the committee that grew into ISRO. He is remembered as the father of the Indian space programme.

He insisted that space technology serve everyday life (education, broadcasting, weather and resources) a direction the programme still follows. He also helped establish several of India’s leading research and management institutions.