Satyendra Nath Bose

01The letter to Einstein

Satyendra Nath was born in north Calcutta, the son of a railway accountant, and topped the M.Sc. examination in mixed mathematics at Presidency College in 1915; Meghnad Saha was his classmate. In 1921 he joined the new University of Dhaka as a reader in physics. Teaching Planck’s radiation law to his students, he found a way to derive it by counting light quanta as particles that cannot be told apart. A British journal turned the paper down. In June 1924 he sent it to Albert Einstein, who translated it himself and had it published in the Zeitschrift für Physik, then extended the idea to atoms.

02Science in Bengali

With the letter from Einstein in hand Bose spent two years in Europe, working in Paris and Berlin. Back in Dhaka he became professor and head of physics, and in 1945 returned to Calcutta University. He believed science should be taught in the mother tongue, and in 1948 founded the Bangiya Bijnan Parishad to publish science in Bengali. He played the esraj and read widely in several languages. He received the Padma Vibhushan in 1954, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1958 and was made National Professor in 1959. Paul Dirac named the particles that obey his statistics bosons.

Place · Villages of Sutanuti, Gobindapur and Kalikata on the Hooghly; Company settlement from 1690Kolkata (Calcutta)The city that grew from three Hooghly villages around a Company factory, capital of British India until 1911, and the birthplace of the Bengal renaissance and of the Swadeshi movement. Kalighat gave it its name.Read →