Satyendra Bose

Born on 1 January 1894 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, theoretical physicist Satyendra Bose made major contributions to quantum mechanics. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics from Presidency College in Calcutta. Bose became a lecturer at a newly created physics postgraduate department at Calcutta University, where he studied recent work on quantum mechanics and translated Albert Einstein’s papers on relativity. In 1924, while working at the University of Dacca, Bose wrote a brief but seminal paper that introduced a way to describe the behavior of photons. He sent the paper to Einstein , who quickly translated it into German and arranged for it to be published in Zeitscrift für Physik. Einstein later extended Bose’s work to describe massive particles, hence the term Bose–Einstein statistics. Paul Dirac coined the word boson to describe particles that obey those statistics. Bose spent much of his later life in India, teaching students and leading various scientific organizations.

Date in History: 1 January 1894