Satyendra Nath Bose was born on New Year’s Day in 1894 in Calcutta, India, the oldest child and only boy of seven siblings. From early on, the distinct mind had forged a career that diverged off the standard mode of staunch, academic life. After receiving his Masters in Science from the University of Calcutta, Bose became a research scholar at the University College in the city, where he earned top accolades. There he explored and worked alongside renowned future astrophysicist Meghnad Saha, and the two developed a lifelong partnership in friendship and academia. Although never achieving his PhD, as a natural teacher with remarkable aptitude Bose was posted as lecturer in the Physics department of the University of Calcutta from 1916 to 1921. He was a gifted instructor who believed educating his students was as important as his own research. Bose was extremely dedicated to making the concepts understandable for the hopeful, young minds that collected before him. Eager himself to be able to expand his own personal knowledge and unearth ideas from many sources, Bose taught himself French and German. And, together with his friend and fellow researcher Saha, translated much of Einstein’s special and general relativity into English.

In 1924, Bose was preparing a lecture for his students on Planck’s law of radiation in relation to The Maxwell Boltzmann Distribution at the University of Dacca, where he had relocated to in 1921. Without any reference to classical physics at all, using only his own new terms and descriptions, the professor hoped to increase deeper inquisitiveness and understanding for his students. In what was to be one of his most substantial scientific achievements, in the process of trying to make the difficult science more translatable, Bose had opened the doorway to the world of Quantum Mechanics. Somehow realizing that he was onto something extraordinary Bose wrote a paper called “Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta.” Based on his lectures postulating that photons are indistinguishable from one another, he submitted the article to Philosophical Magazine, where it was rejected. Refusing to give up, he then sent it to Albert Einstein in Germany who was immediately astounded by the magnitude of the work, and submitted it on behalf of Bose to the highly esteemed journal  Zeitschrift für Physik, where at last it reached publication.

Bose had transcended the traditional Boltzmann’s statistics to form a new theory.  His unconventional approach, that deviated from mainstream academia created a new scientific arena teeming with possibility. After this instrumental finding, Bose was invited to Europe where he converged his mind with the likes of Marie Curie, Louis de Broglie and Albert Einstein in their various laboratories.  Einstein was so inspired by the possibilities of the young man’s theory, that he applied it to atoms, and thus the Einstein -Bose condensate was born. And Bosons (a name first coined by Physicist Paul Dirac to honor Bose’s contributions along with fermions, to later be discovered in the 1960’s) became the material that scientists believed constructed the Universe. Proving its components and absolute existence would become the lifelong work and research of many brilliant minds, making careers, creating new understandings and further expanding the gateways into the quantum worlds. This condensate has been, and continues to be instrumental in the creation of very complex systems including the ongoing evolution of the world wide web.