Born: 5th October 1813
Died: 17th May 1870
Shri Radhanath Sikdar was born on 5th October 1813, Calcutta. Since childhood, he has had an interest in reading and writing. His family was not financially strong and because of his hard work, he got a scholarship to study. He got admission to the Hindu school of Calcutta (now Presidency University) in the year 1824. Mathematics was his favorite subject, so he pursued his education in the same subject. In 1831, he got a job as a computer, in the Survey of India, where at that time Sir George was the director. Computers were not invented at that time and people used to do calculations manually and such people were called ‘Computers’.During the 1830s, the team of the Survey of India came closer to the Himalayan range. The Kanchenjunga mountain peak was observed as the highest mountain peak in the world at that time. Later a mountain peak named ‘Peak 15’ was discovered and the work for its measurement was given to Radhanath Sikdar. It was Mount Everest which was previously called Peak 15. Foreigners were not allowed at that time to enter the border of Nepal. Therefore, Radhanath Sikdar could not go there, but from a distance, with the help of a special tool and TRIGONOMETRY formulas, he calculated the height of Peak 15 which came to be 8839 meters. In 1852, he shared this information with Andrew Scott Waugh, who was the director of the Survey of India at that time, but Andrew Scott Waugh did not tell anyone about Radhanath Sikdar’s success and kept it as a secret and gauged his claim for four years. Finally, he came to know that the claim was completely correct. Though Andrew had a duty to give credit to Radhanath Sikdar, he did not. Instead, he regarded Sir George Everest as his mentor and sent a proposal to be named Mount Everest, and the proposal was accepted, and all the credit for measuring the official height of Mount Everest was taken away from Radhanath Sikdar and given to an Englishman who had not even seen it.