Dr R Parthasarathy graduated in Physics from St. Joseph’s College, Tiruchirapalli. He obtained his Engineering degree (D.I.I.Sc) from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and his Ph.D in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Roorkee (now IIT Roorkee).

Engineering
Appleton, Edward
Arago, Jean
Babbage, Charles
Baird, John
Callendar, Hugh
Carnot, Sadi
Cotton, Arthur
Diesel, Rudolf
Esaki, Leo
Faraday, Michael
Fulton, Robert
Giaever, Ivar
Haber, Fritz
Haggerty, Patrick
Heaviside, Oliver
Henry, Joseph
Hertz, Heinrich
Karman, Theodore von
Kelvin, Lord
Krupp, Alfred
Langmuir, Irving
Marconi, Guglielmo
Ohain, Hans von
Shannon, Claude
Taylor, G.I.
Terzaghi, Karl
Tesla, Nicola
Steinmetz, Charles
Stephenson, George
Watt, James
Whittle, Frank
Zworykin, Vladimir

Physics
Becquerel, Henri
Bohr, Niels
Boltzmann, Ludwig
Born, Max
Bragg, Lawrence
Bragg, William
Cavendish, Henry
Chadwick, James
Coulomb, Charles
Crookes, William
Dirac, Paul
Doppler, Christian
Fermi, Enrico
Foucault, Jean
Fraunhofer, Joseph
Fresnel, August
Heisenberg, Werner
Helmholtz, Hermann
Huygens, Christian
Kapitza, Peter
Mach, Ernst
Millikan, Robert
Pauli, Wolfgang
Peltier, Jean Charles
Planck, Max
Raman, C.V.
Roentgen, William
Rutherford, Ernst
Stefan, Josef
van der Waals, Johannes
Wien, Wilhelm
Young, Thomas

Mathematics
Abel, Henrik
Bessel, Friedrich
Boole, George
Bradley, James
Cantor, Georg
Cauchy, Augustin
Chandrasekar, S.
Descartes, Rene
Erdos, Paul
Euler, Leonhard
Fourier, Joseph
Galois, Evariste
Gauss, Carl
Halley, Edmund
Hawking, Stephen
Hilbert, David
Herschel, John
Herschel, William
Lagrange, Joseph
Laplace, Pierre
Leibniz, Gottfried
Pascal, Blaise
Poincare, Henri
Ramachandra, Yasudas
Ramanujan, Srinivasa
Riemann, Bernhard
Wiener, Norbert

Chemistry
Arrhenius, Svante
Avogadro, Amedeo
Berthollet, Claude
Berzelius, Jacob
Black, Joseph
Bunsen, Robert
Dalton, John
Dulong, Pierre
Fourcroy, Antoine
Gay-Lussac, Joseph
Hodgkin, Dorothy
Hofmann, August von
Joliot-Curie, Irene
Kekule, Friederich
Lavoisier, Antoine
Liebig, Justus von
Mendeleev, Dmitri
Perkin, William
Ramsay, William
Travers, Morris

Life Science
Ali, Salim
Darwin, Charles
Freud, Sigmund
Ehrlich, Paul
Einthoven, Willem
Haller, Albrecht von
Harvey, William
Leeuwenhoek, Antony von
Pavlov, Ivan
Ramachandran, G.N.
Wallace, Alfred
Woehler, Friedrich

In science, a spectacular achievement is remembered but the foundation on which the achievement was based is often forgotten; Dr Parthasarathy reminds us of this basic fact. The scientists selected by the author span several centuries and almost all the persons who laid the foundation of modern science and built its edifice are there. This is a store-house of information, there is almost nothing in it, which is not interesting.