IISc’s neighbourhood has a long and rich history In the late 1890s, JN Tata was hunting for a suitable location for what eventually came to be known as the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). By the early 1900s, Bangalore had become the frontrunner to host the research institute, not least because of the wholehearted support […]
PR Krishnaswamy, who was a student in the Department of Biochemistry in the 1950s, went on to have a distinguished yet unconventional research career. In the first of this two-part profile, Krishnaswamy, now 91, describes the influence of his mentors in the Department.
Tata medical philanthropy in colonial India was not confined to investing in bricks and mortar but also aimed at creating a culture of medical research.
2019 is the birth centenary of Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of India’s space programme, who was born in Ahmedabad on 12 August 1919. Sarabhai, pursuing his studies at Cambridge when WWII broke out, returned to India to work with CV Raman at IISc, where he also met Homi J Bhabha. In these excerpts from her […]
11 December 2019 marks the 137th birth anniversary of Max Born, who came to IISc on CV Raman’s invitation The Mysterious Number 137 was the title of a lecture that Max Born delivered to the South Indian Science Association in Bangalore on 7 November 1935. Called the fine structure constant α, 137 is a dimensionless […]
The first national effort to understand the meteorological phenomenon For about four months from May to September 1990, the Indian summer monsoon was the subject of unprecedented nationwide attention. While the monsoon winds raced from Kerala to the northwest of India in 35 days, less than its usual 45, researchers on land, air and sea […]
Syed Ameenulla, who joined IISc as a lab assistant and went on to be a scientific officer, recalls his involvement in the Institute’s monsoon experiments In the monsoon of 1979, Chandipur beach in Balasore, Odisha was host to a small group of researchers from Bangalore. The team, from IISc and the National Aeronautical Laboratory (NAL), […]
KP Sinha, a versatile physicist whose association with IISc stretches back almost fifty years, will turn 90 in July 2019 KP Sinha is an unusual man. Getting one PhD is hard work, but he chose to do two. And rare though it is for theoretical physicists to work in more than one field, Sinha mastered […]
The Centre for Electronics Design and Technology (CEDT, now the Department of Electronic Systems Engineering) was established in 1975. The initiative for this Indo-Swiss collaboration was taken by Arvind Shah, who recounts the events in this 2014 memoir. After finishing my studies in Electrical Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, […]
It was in 1946 that Dhawan arrived at the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT, now Graduate Aerospace Laboratories), wanting to work with Hans Liepmann. But the Indian students Liepmann had worked with until then had given him the impression that “perhaps the select group that came to Caltech from India […]
