| 
Srinivasa Ramanujan
- He was an Indian mathematician and autodidact who, with almost no formal training in pure mathematics, made extraordinary contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series and continued fractions.
- Nationality: India
- Known for: 1.Landau–Ramanujan constant, 2.Mock theta functions, 3.Ramanujan conjecture, 4.Ramanujan prime, 5.Ramanujan–Soldner constant, 6.Ramanujan theta function, 7.Ramanujan's sum, 7.Rogers–Ramanujan identities
- The Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has announced that the 22nd December, the 125th birthday of Mathematical Genius Srinivas Ramanujan, will be celebrated as the National Mathematics Day every year and year 2012 as the National Mathematical Year.
- He demonstrated a natural ability, and was given books on advanced trigonometry written by S. L. Loney.
- The Ramanujan Journal, an international publication, was launched to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by his work.
- A common anecdote about Ramanujan relates to the number 1729.
- Ramanujan is said to have stated on the spot that it was actually a very interesting number mathematically, being the smallest natural number representable in two different ways as a sum of two cubes:
- Generalizations of this idea have created the notion of "taxicab numbers". Coincidentally, 1729 is also a Carmichael Number.
- A stamp picturing Ramanujan was released by the Government of India in 1962 – the 75th anniversary of Ramanujan's birth – commemorating his achievements in the field of number theory.
C. V. Raman
- He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for the discovery that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the light that is deflected changes in wavelength. This phenomenon is now called Raman scattering and is the result of the Raman effect.
- Nationality Indian
- He was the first Asian and first non-White to receive any Nobel Prize in the sciences. Before him Rabindranath Tagore (also Indian) had received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.
- In 1947, he was appointed as the first National Professor by the new government of Independent India.
- C.V. Raman was the paternal uncle of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics (1983) for his discovery of the Chandrasekhar limit in 1931 and for his subsequent work on the nuclear reactions necessary for stellar evolution.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
- He was an Indian astrophysicist who, with William A. Fowler, won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for key discoveries that led to the currently accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars.
- Chandrasekhar was the nephew of Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930.
- He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1953.
- During World War II, Chandrasekhar worked at the Ballistic Research Laboratories at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. While there, he worked on problems of ballistics; for example, two reports from 1943 were titled, On the decay of plane shock waves and The normal reflection of a blast wave.
- During the period, 1971 to 1983 he studied the mathematical theory of black holes, and, finally, during the late 80s, he worked on the theory of colliding gravitational waves.
- He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his studies on the physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars.
- Chandrasekhar's most notable work was the astrophysical Chandrasekhar limit. The limit describes the maximum mass of a white dwarf star, ~1.44 solar masses, or equivalently, the minimum mass above which a star will ultimately collapse into a neutron star or black hole (following a supernova).
- In 1999, NASA named the third of its four "Great Observatories" after Chandrasekhar.
