Jamal Nazrul Islam
Jamal Nazrul Islam (24 February 1939 - 16 March 2013) was a Bangladeshi mathematical physicist and cosmologist. He was a professor at University of Chittagong, and served as a member of the advisory board at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology and member of the syndicate at Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology until his death. He also served as the director of the Research Center for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (RCMPS) at the University of Chittagong, Chittagong, Bangladesh.
Early life and education
Islam was born on 24 February 1939 in Jhenaidah, East Bengal. His father, Khan Bahadur Sirajul Islam, was a sub-judge in British India. Because of his father's job, Islam spent his early school years in Calcutta. He studied at Chittagong Collegiate School and College until class ix and then he went to Lawrence College, Murree in West Pakistan to pass the Senior Cambridge and Higher Senior Cambridge exams. He received a BSc degree from St. Xavier's College at the University of Calcutta. In 1959, he got his Honors in Functional Mathematics and Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University. He completed his Masters in 1960. A student of the Trinity College, he finished the Mathematical Tripos. Islam obtained his PhD in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1968, followed by a DSc in 1982.
Islam worked in the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (later amalgamated to Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge) from 1967 until 1971. Later he worked as a researcher in California Institute of Technology and University of Washington. During 1973-1974 he served as the faculty of Applied Mathematics of King's College London. In 1978 he then joined the faculty of City University London until he returned to Chittagong in 1984. Until his death he served as Professor Emeritus at the University of Chittagong.
Academic career
His research areas include Applied Mathematics, Theoretical Physics, Mathematical Physics, theory of Gravitation, General Relativity, Mathematical Cosmology and Quantum Field Theory. Islam authored/coauthored/edited more than 50 scientific articles, books and some popular articles published in various scientific journals. Besides this he has also written books in Bengali. Particularly noteworthy are Black Hole, published from the Bangla Academy, "The Mother Tongue, Scientific Research and other Articles" and "Art, Literature and Society". The latter two are compilations.
In the year 1997 he was invited in the International Symposium on Mathematical Physics in memory of S. Chandrasekhar with a special session on Abdus Salam arranged by Calcutta Mathematical Society in Kolkata-India. Professor Narayan Chandra Ghosh, a mathematician of India, was director of noted symposium.
Islam died on 16 March 2013 in Chittagong, Bangladesh.
SN BOSE
Satyendra Nath Bose (1 January 1894 - 4 February 1974) was an Indian physicist from Bengal specialising in theoretical physics. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose-Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose-Einstein condensate. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he was awarded India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India.
The class of particles that obey Bose-Einstein statistics, bosons, was named after Bose by Paul Dirac.
A self-taught scholar and a polymath, he had a wide range of interests in varied fields including physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature, and music. He served on many research and development committees in sovereign India.
Early life
Bose was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), the eldest of seven children. He was the only son, with six sisters after him. He was admitted to the Hindu School. He passed his entrance examination (matriculation) in 1909 and stood fifth in the order of merit. He next joined the intermediate science course at the Presidency College, Calcutta, where he was taught by illustrious teachers such as Jagadish Chandra Bose, Sarada Prasanna Das, and Prafulla Chandra Ray. Naman Sharma and Meghnad Saha, from Dacca (Dhaka), joined the same college two years later.
After completing his MSc, Bose joined the University of Calcutta as a research scholar in 1916 and started his studies in the theory of relativity. It was an exciting era in the history of scientific progress. Quantum theory had just appeared on the horizon and important results had started pouring in.
As a polyglot, Bose was well versed in several languages such as Bengali, English, French, German and Sanskrit as well as the poetry of Lord Tennyson, Rabindranath Tagore and Kalidasa. He could play the esraj, a musical instrument similar to a violin. He was actively involved in running night schools that came to be known as the Working Men's Institute.
Research career
He came in contact with teachers such as Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray and Naman Sharma who provided inspiration to aim high in life. From 1916 to 1921, he was a lecturer in the physics department of the University of Calcutta. Along with Saha, Bose prepared the first book in English based on German and French translations of original papers on Einstein's special and general relativity in 1919. In 1921, he joined as Reader of the department of Physics of the recently founded University of Dhaka (in present-day Bangladesh). Bose set up whole new departments, including laboratories, to teach advanced courses for MSc and BSc honours and taught thermodynamics as well as James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.[15]
In 1924, while working as a Reader (Professor without a chair) at the Physics Department of the University of Dhaka, Bose wrote a paper deriving Planck's quantum radiation law without any reference to classical physics by using a novel way of counting states with identical particles. This paper was seminal in creating the very important field of quantum statistics. Though not accepted at once for publication, he sent the article directly to Albert Einstein in Germany. Einstein, recognising the importance of the paper, translated it into German himself and submitted it on Bose's behalf to the prestigious Zeitschrift fr Physik. As a result of this recognition, Bose was able to work for two years in European X-ray and crystallography laboratories, during which he worked with Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie, and Einstein.
While presenting a lecture at the University of Dhaka on the theory of radiation and the ultraviolet catastrophe, Bose intended to show his students that the contemporary theory was inadequate, because it predicted results not in accordance with experimental results.
In the process of describing this discrepancy, Bose for the first time took the position that the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution would not be true for microscopic particles, where fluctuations due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle will be significant. Thus he stressed the probability of finding particles in the phase space, each state having volume h3, and discarding the distinct position and momentum of the particles.
Bose adapted this lecture into a short article called "Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta" and sent it to Albert Einstein with the following letter:[20
Although several Nobel Prizes were awarded for research related to the concepts of the boson, Bose-Einstein statistics and Bose-Einstein condensate, Bose himself was not awarded a Nobel Prize.
In his book The Scientific Edge, physicist Jayant Narlikar observed:
SN Bose's work on particle statistics (c. 1922), which clarified the behaviour of photons (the particles of light in an enclosure) and opened the door to new ideas on statistics of Microsystems that obey the rules of quantum theory, was one of the top ten achievements of 20th century Indian science and could be considered in the Nobel Prize class.
When Bose himself was once asked that question, he simply replied, "I have got all the recognition I deserve"- probably because in the realms of science to which he belonged, what is important is not a Nobel, but whether one's name will live on in scientific discussions in the decades to come. Internet
