Indian scientists in history and their discoveries

How this list was chosen

Indian science has a long written record: Sanskrit treatises on mathematics, astronomy and medicine from the first millennium, the Kerala school of mathematics in the 14th to 16th centuries, and modern laboratory science from the 1890s. We chose four scientists for detailed entries, two ancient and two modern, whose own texts or papers survive and can be read in English translation.

After them comes a shorter section with twelve more names, each with a date and the one discovery to remember. This page tries to be exact about what each person did, because Indian science is often both underrated and overclaimed online. Where a claim is legend or disputed, we say so.

Aryabhata (476 to about 550 CE): pi, sines and a spinning Earth

Aryabhata wrote the Aryabhatiya in 499 CE at Kusumapura, usually identified with Pataliputra (modern Patna), at the age of 23. In 121 Sanskrit verses it covers arithmetic, algebra, a table of sines and astronomy.

• Pi: he gave the circumference of a circle of diameter 20,000 as 62,832, which makes pi 3.1416, and called it approximate (Ganitapada, verse 10).
• The Earth’s rotation: he compared the stars’ westward motion to the way the shore seems to move backward for someone in a boat (Golapada, verse 9).
• Eclipses: explained as the Moon covering the Sun and the Earth’s shadow covering the Moon, not demons.
• Kuttaka: a method for solving linear equations in whole numbers, used for astronomical cycles.

Most lists miss: he did not invent zero, and he did not say the Earth goes round the Sun; his system was geocentric. Later astronomers, including Brahmagupta, criticised some of his ideas. India named its first satellite after him in 1975.

Sushruta (1st millennium BCE, dates uncertain): the surgeon’s handbook

Sushruta is the teacher named in the Sushruta Samhita, a Sanskrit treatise of Ayurveda that stands out for surgery. It describes rebuilding a cut-off nose with a flap of skin from the cheek, couching of cataracts, the treatment of fractures, and over a hundred surgical instruments. The text was added to over many centuries; its later section, the Uttaratantra, is younger than the core.

Most lists miss: it insists on practice. Students were to rehearse cutting on gourds, cucumbers and melons, and stitching on cloth and leather, before touching a patient (Sutrasthana, chapter 9). Centuries later, in 1794, a London magazine described an Indian nose operation at Pune, and European surgeons began to copy it. Calling Sushruta “the father of plastic surgery” is a modern title; the dating of “600 BCE” often seen online is a guess. This is history, not medical advice.

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858 to 1937): radio waves and plant responses

Jagadish Chandra Bose, professor of physics at Presidency College, Calcutta, generated and detected radio waves only millimetres long in the mid-1890s, far shorter than others were using, and built detectors including a galena crystal detector. He demonstrated the work at the Royal Institution in London in 1897. Later he turned to plants, inventing the crescograph, which magnified plant growth so it could be measured, and showing that plant tissues respond electrically to stimuli.

Most lists miss: he did not want to patent science, but friends persuaded him to file one US patent (No. 755,840, granted 1904), an early patent for a semiconductor detector. The IEEE recognised his millimetre-wave experiments as an engineering milestone in 2012. He also wrote one of the earliest Bengali science fiction stories, about a cyclone stopped by a bottle of hair oil. He founded the Bose Institute in Calcutta in 1917. Claims that he “invented radio” overstate it.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887 to 1920): series, partitions and the lost notebook

Srinivasa Ramanujan, a largely self-taught clerk from Kumbakonam working in Madras, wrote to G. H. Hardy at Cambridge on 16 January 1913 with pages of theorems. He went to Cambridge in 1914, published with Hardy a formula for the number of partitions of a whole number, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1918. He died in Kumbakonam in 1920, aged 32.

Most lists miss: in 1976 the mathematician George Andrews found a bundle of Ramanujan’s last pages, the “lost notebook”, among another mathematician’s papers at Trinity College, Cambridge. It contained his mock theta functions, still an active research area. India marks his birthday, 22 December, as National Mathematics Day.

Twelve more Indian scientists and what they discovered

These scientists belong on any full list. Start with the date and discovery given here, then look for their own texts or papers.

• Baudhayana (Sulba Sutra, roughly 800 to 500 BCE, dating uncertain): stated the relation of a rectangle’s sides to its diagonal, the result later called Pythagoras’ theorem, for building fire altars.
• Charaka (early centuries CE, traditional): the Charaka Samhita, the classic Ayurvedic text on internal medicine and diagnosis.
• Varahamihira (6th century): the Pancha Siddhantika, a summary of five astronomical systems.
• Brahmagupta (born 598): the Brahmasphutasiddhanta (628) gave rules for arithmetic with zero and negative numbers.
• Bhaskara II (born 1114): the Lilavati and Siddhanta Shiromani (about 1150), on arithmetic, algebra and astronomy.
• Madhava of Sangamagrama (about 1340 to 1425): founder of the Kerala school, who found infinite series for pi and for sine and cosine, centuries before European mathematicians.
• Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861 to 1944): chemist who described mercurous nitrite in 1896 and founded Bengal Chemicals in 1901.
• C. V. Raman (1888 to 1970): discovered in 1928 that light changes wavelength when scattered by molecules, the Raman effect, and won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics. 28 February is India’s National Science Day.
• Meghnad Saha (1893 to 1956): the Saha ionisation equation (1920), used to read the temperatures of stars.
• Satyendra Nath Bose (1894 to 1974): a 1924 paper on counting light quanta, which Einstein translated and extended; bosons are named after him.
• Asima Chatterjee (1917 to 2006): chemist of medicinal plants, the first woman to earn a Doctor of Science from an Indian university (Calcutta, 1944).
• S. Chandrasekhar (1910 to 1995): calculated in 1930 the maximum mass of a white dwarf star, the Chandrasekhar limit, and shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Other names worth following up include Janaki Ammal, the botanist who worked on sugarcane breeding, and Har Gobind Khorana, who shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on the genetic code.

Summary table: Indian scientists and their discoveries

Project ideas on Indian scientists

• Check the claim: take three popular claims (“Aryabhata invented zero”, “Bose invented radio”, “surgery began in India”) and write what the sources actually show.
• Then and now: show how Bose’s millimetre waves connect to today’s wireless technology, with one diagram and five sentences.
• Recreate a calculation: compute pi from Aryabhata’s verse and compare it with Madhava’s series using the first five terms.
• Interview practice: prepare questions for Jagadish Chandra Bose or Ramanujan and try them by voice on Yuga, available in 24 languages including Hindi, Bengali and Tamil. The AI recreations are built from the scientists’ writings and the record, but they are not the real people and can be wrong, so cite the texts and papers, not the app.

More: ancient India key figures, famous mathematicians in history and pioneers of medicine.