Prof. Meghnad Saha

Prof. Meghnad Saha

Born: 6th October 1893

Died: 16th February 1956

Shri Meghnad Saha was born on 6th October 1893 in village Shaoratoli, in Dacca. Withstanding economic crises, his parents educated their children. During school, history and mathematics were his favorite subjects. He passed the intermediate examination in 1911, and got the third rank, while the first position was achieved by Shri Satyendra Nath Bose, who later became a great scientist. Meghnad Saha joined Presidency College, Calcutta, where Satyendra Nath Bose was again his classmate. At Presidency College, he was taught by two great men of science, Aacharya Prafulla Chandra Ray and Jagadish Chandra Bose, who had excelled in various fields. Keeping alive his hunt for academic excellence, Saha completed BSc in Mathematics (1913) and finished MSc in Applied Mathematics in two years (1915). In 1916, he got appointed as a lecturer at the University College of Science, Calcutta in the Department of Applied Mathematics. Satyendra Nath Bose also joined the same university. 1919, Saha obtained his Ph.D. degree from Calcutta University and desired the Premchand Roychand Scholarship for a thesis on the Harvard Classification of Stellar Spectra. The scholarship allowed Saha to travel to Europe for two years for his research work. After a session with Alfred Fowler, a renowned British astronomer in London, Saha shifted to Berlin to work in the lab of Walther Nernst for scientific work, who is 1920, got the Nobel Award for Chemistry. In 1923, Saha got appointed as a professor of physics at the University of Allahabad and remained there for the next 15 years. In 1925, his work in astrophysics got recognition and he got the position as the president of the physics section at the Indian Science Congress Association. In 1920, Saha published four papers on his astrophysical research in the Philosophical Magazine and his thesis won the prestigious Griffith Prize initiated by Calcutta University. He always believed in the peaceful use of nuclear energy. In 1952, he took part in elections in parliamentary elections and won them independently. In 1956, because of his efforts that the Saka Calendar, or the Indian national calendar, was endorsed.

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