C. V. Raman

Born in Tamil Nadu in 1888, Raman tore through school, finishing his bachelor's in physics at 16 and publishing on light diffraction while still a graduate student. He joined the Indian Finance Service at 19 as an accountant in Calcutta, but spent his nights at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, running experiments in acoustics and optics on his own time. In 1917 he became the first Palit Professor of Physics at Rajabazar Science College; a sea voyage to Europe convinced him the prevailing explanation for the ocean's blue was wrong. Using a spectrograph he built, he and student K. S. Krishnan discovered in 1928 that light scattering through transparent materials shifts wavelength - the Raman effect. Two years later he took the Nobel Prize in Physics, the first Asian and non-White laureate in the field. He directed the Indian Institute of Science from 1933, founded the Indian Academy of Sciences, and in 1948 opened the Raman Research Institute in Bengaluru, where he worked until his death in 1970.