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.