Ravi Kunjwal

Can you recognize the physicist standing between Dirac and SN Bose in this picture? She is Purnima Sinha, one of the first women PhDs from India. Sinha was Bose's PhD student. Although Bose was famous for his theoretical work(Bose statistics), he was also a keen experimenter. Sinha's project was experimental, it involved X-ray analysis of clay. Buying an X-ray machine was unthinkable in the budget available to Indian universities in the 1950s. But Bose had learned the DIY approach to building instruments from his teacher, the legendary J.C. Bose. He passed it on to Sinha. Together, they built a X-ray machine from WW2 surpluses which were being sold as scrap in the footpaths of Kolkata. After successfully completing her PhD, Sinha joined a biophysics project in Stanford university on the origin of life. On her return, she had a long and distinguished career in research in places including Geological Survey of India and JC Bose Institute. Sinha also wrote on music, played a musical instrument herself, painted, sculpted and translated books. Her daughters Supurna Sinha and Sukanya Sinha, and her niece Sudeshna Sinha are all physicists. Purnima Sinha passed away in 2015.