- Lived:
- 6 October 1893, Seoratali village, Dhaka district, East Bengal (now in Bangladesh) → Calcutta (Kolkata), London, Berlin, Allahabad, Calcutta again, and finally the floor of India's first Lok Sabha; died in Delhi, 16 February 1956, on his way to the Planning Commission
- Field:
- astrophysics — the founding equation of stellar spectroscopy — and then rivers, calendars, institutions and Parliament
- The Big Idea:
- A star's light carries a barcode of dark lines. Saha's ionization equation (1920) is the key that reads it — it tells you, from the lines alone, how hot a star is and what it is made of. Every time an astronomer says "that star is mostly hydrogen," they are using Saha's equation.
- In their words:
- "I have gradually glided into politics…" — his own account, as a sitting MP, of why a world-famous physicist stood for election
- If you remember one thing:
- A shopkeeper's son from a Dhaka village, barred from the dining hall by caste and thrown out of school by the British, taught humanity to read what the stars are made of — and then spent his last years in Parliament losing, loudly and honourably, the argument over how a poor country should run its science.