Google doodles for CV Raman's 125th birthday

Google is celebrating the birthday of one of India’s most prominent scientists with a doodle today. CV Raman’s 125th birth anniversary has seen Google come up with an interesting illustration for its India home page.

The doodle today sheds light on the scientist’s most renowned work – the Raman effect. While Chandrashekara Venkata Raman’s face is featured behind Google’s G, the letters O that follow demonstrate the Raman effect, the discovery that won the Indian scientist a Nobel Prize.

Celebrating CV Raman’s 125th birth anniversary

The effect shown in the doodle is described thus: When a beam of light traverses a dust-free, transparent sample of a chemical compound, a small fraction of the light emerges in directions other than that of the incident (incoming) beam. Most of this scattered light is of unchanged wavelength. A small part, however, has wavelengths different from that of the incident light; its presence is a result of the Raman effect.

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Raman was born in 1888 in Trichinopoly, or modern day Tiruchirappali in Tamil Nadu. He managed to enter into Presidency College in Madras at the age of 13 in 1902 and passed his BA examination in first place, winning a gold medal in physics. He went on to clear his MA and then joined the government service. He followed it up by teaching physics at the University of Calcutta.

Thanks to his work on the Raman effect, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Raman became the first Asian and first non-white person to receive any Nobel Prize in the sciences. The scientist was also knighted by the British monarch in 1929. Raman also worked on the acoustics of musical instruments, as well as on the discovery of quantum photon spin later on. He died at the age of 82 in Bangalore in 1970.

This is the second Google Doodle celebrating Indian talent this week. A very interesting Doodle celebrating India’s “human computer” Shakuntala Devi’s 84th birth anniversary was revealed on November 5. It showed a calculator font along with Shakuntala Devi’s image. While none of these two Doodle’s have been interactive, they’ve been interesting all the same.