Early Life and Education
Ramachandran was born in the town of Madras, India in a Tamil Family. Gopalasamudram, the native place of his family, is a village in the old Tirunelveli District of Madras Presidency. He joined the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1942 in the Electrical Engineering Department. Quickly realizing his interest in physics, he switched to the Department of Physics to complete his master's and doctoral thesis under the supervision of Nobel laureate Sir C. V. Raman. In 1942, he received a master's degree in physics from Madras University with his thesis submmited from Bangalore (he did not attend any Madras college at that time). He subsequently received his D.Sc. degree in 1947. Here he mostly studied crystal physics and crystal optics. During his studies he created an X-ray focusing mirror for the X-ray microscope. The resulting field of crystal topography is used extensively in studies involving crystal growth and solid-state reactivity.
Ramachandran then spent two years (1947–1949) at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. for 'studies on X-ray diffuse scattering and its application to determination of elastic constants' under the direction of Professor William Alfred Wooster, popularly known as W.A. Wooster, a leading crystallography expert in the world.
Read more about this topic: G. N. Ramachandran
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Betwixt the black fronts long-withdrawn
A light-blue lane of early dawn,”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“TO EXPRESS THE EMOTIONS OF LIFE IS TO LIVE. TO EXPRESS THE LIFE OF EMOTIONS IS TO MAKE ART.”
—Jane Heap (c. 1880–1964)
“The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)