Unsung Genius: A Life of Jagadish Chandra Bose by Kunal Ghosh [Hardcover]

Jagadish Chandra Bose, also called the ‘father of radio science’, was one of the most prominent figures of India’s scientific community. Between 1895 and 1900, Bose made remarkable contributions to certain fundamental aspects of modern physics. Then, his interest shifted to plant physiology and here, too, he was responsible for major discoveries and insights. However, within a few decades of his death in 1937, the scientific community in particular and the world at large seemed to have forgotten about him.

Starting from the time of his birth in 1858 in a Brahmo family in Bengal Presidency, and ending with his death a week before his seventy-ninth birthday, this exhaustive biography takes a close look at Bose’s early career as a physicist and his later work as a plant physiologist, and explains the magic behind some of his pioneering findings. It describes how he dealt with racial discrimination and academic plagiarism during his life, and how he found strength, inspiration, and support in the unlikeliest of places. It also makes a case for why Bose, and not Guglielmo Marconi, should have won the 1919 Nobel Prize for Physics for his research into radio waves. The first in-depth biography of the scientist written in the twenty-first century, Unsung Genius: A Life of Jagadish Chandra Bose paints a striking portrait of Bose—the man, the nationalist, the scientist, and inventor par excellence whom the world has almost forgotten.