Category Great Scientist

Who was the first person to closely observe the Moon?

          Ever since Man started looking at the Moon with his naked eyes, he was curious to learn about this brightly shining heavenly body. It was an Italian scientist who closely observed the Moon for the first time. His name was Galileo Galilei.

          It happened in 1609. Galileo built an equipment called telescope that made objects in space look larger and closer.

          For centuries, scientists had believed that the Moon had a smooth surface. Galileo shattered this belief; he observed that the Moon’s surface was not so smooth; instead it had mountains, pits, valleys, shadows and other features, just like the surface of the Earth. He thought the vast dark shadowy areas to be seas of water and called them ‘maria’, the Latin word for sea. Galileo’s work laid the foundation for modern studies in astronomy.

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Har Gobind Khorana

Har Gobind Khorana

Har Gobind Khorana (9 January 1922 – 9 November 2011) was an Indian American biochemist. While on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for research that showed the order of nucleotides in nucleic acids, which carry the genetic code of the cell and control the cell’s synthesis of proteins. Khorana and Nirenberg were also awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University in the same year.

Fields

  • Molecular biology

Known for

  • First to demonstrate the role of nucleotides in protein synthesis

Awards

  • Nobel Prize in Medicine (1968)
  • Gairdner Foundation International Award (1980)
  • Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
  • ForMemRS (1978)
  • Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research
  • Padma Vibhushan
  • Willard Gibbs Award (1974)

Institutions

  • MIT (1970–2007)
  • University of Wisconsin, Madison (1960–70)
  • University of British Columbia (1952–60)
  • University of Cambridge (1950–52)
  • Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (1948–49)

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Swapan Chattopadhyay

Swapan Chattopadhyay is a particle accelerator physicist noted for his pioneering contributions of innovative concepts, techniques and developments in high energy particle colliders, coherent and incoherent light sources, ultrafast sciences in the femto- and atto- second regimes, superconducting linear accelerators and various applications of interaction of particle and light beams.

Fields

  • Physics

Institutions

  • Northern Illinois University and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (2014–)
  • Cockcroft Institute (2007–2014)
  • Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and Lancaster, UK (2007–2014)
  • Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (2001–2007)
  • University of California at Berkeley (1974–1982, 1984–2001, 2010–)
  • Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (1976–1982, 1984–2001)
  • CERN (1982–1984, 2008–)

Known for

  • Particle accelerator science and technology

Awards

  • Fellow of American Physical Society,
  • American Association for the Advancement of Science,
  • Institute of Physics (UK), and
  • the Royal Society of Arts (UK)

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Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician who lived during the British Rule in India. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems considered to be unsolvable.

During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations). Many were completely novel; his original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime, the Ramanujan theta function, partition formulae and mock theta functions, have opened entire new areas of work and inspired a vast amount of further research.

Known for

  • Landau–Ramanujan constant
  • Mock theta functions
  • Ramanujan conjecture
  • Ramanujan prime
  • Ramanujan–Soldner constant
  • Ramanujan theta function
  • Ramanujan’s sum
  • Rogers–Ramanujan identities
  • Ramanujan’s master theorem
  • Ramanujan–Sato series

Awards

  • Fellow of the Royal Society

Fields

  • Mathematics

Institutions

  • Trinity College, Cambridge

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Rajesh Gopakumar

Rajesh Gopakumar (born 1967 in Kolkata, India) a theoretical physicist is director of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR) in Bangalore, India. He was previously a professor at Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI) in Allahabad, India. He is known for his work on topological string theory.

Awards

  • Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award,
  • ICTP Prize

Fields

  • String Theory,
  • Theoretical Physics

Institutions

  • Harish-Chandra Research Institute
  • Institute for Advanced Study

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Who was Galileo?

            Galileo (1564-1642), the great Italian scientist and mathematician, was the first astronomer to use a telescope, the discoverer of the pendulum’s laws and the founder of modern physics.

            Two of his great contributions to knowledge are associated with famous buildings in Pisa, the northern Italian city where he was born. When Galileo was 19, he observed a lamp swinging in the cathedral. From its movement he concluded that a pendulum swinging to and fro could be used for measuring time, and so prepared the way for the invention of the modern clock. By dropping objects from the Learning Tower of Pisa he demonstrated that bodies of different weights fall at the same rate.

            While Professor of Mathematics at the University of Padua (1592-1610), Galileo made his first telescope by fitting a lens at each end of an organ pipe. Later he made a telescope that magnified 30 times. He found that the Milky Way was a mass of stars, studied the moon and discovered the four largest satellites of the planet Jupiter.

            Galileo’s observations convinced him that Nicholaus Copernicus (1473-1543), the Polish astronomer, was right in his theory that the earth rotates on its axis and revolves round the sun. This view was contrary to the teaching of the Church, and in 1616 he was given o formal warning. But in 1632 he published a dialogue in support of the Copernican system that offended the Church by its satire and use of Holy Scripture. He was summoned before the Inquisition, forced to retract his views and made to live in seclusion for the rest of his life.

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