Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam was an aerospace scientist, served as the 11th President of India from 2002 to 2007. He spent four decades as a scientist and science administrator, mainly at the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) and Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and was intimately involved in India's civilian space programme and military missile development efforts. He thus came to be known as the Missile Man of India for his work on the development of ballistic missile and launch vehicle technology. He also played a pivotal organizational, technical, and political role in India's Pokhran-II nuclear tests in 1998, the first since the original nuclear test by India in 1974. Dr. Kalam strongly advocated an action plan to develop India into a "knowledge superpower" by the year 2020.

Chandrashekhara Venkata Raman was an Indian physicist. Raman employed monochromatic light from a mercury arc lamp which penetrated transparent material and was allowed to fall on a spectrograph to record its spectrum. He detected lines in the spectrum, which were later called Raman lines. This earned him the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physics. He was the first person in Asia to receive this award for achievements in science. He discovered that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light changes wavelength and amplitude. This phenomenon, subsequently known as Raman scattering, results from the Raman Effect. Pringsheim was the first to coin the term "Raman effect" and "Raman lines. In the year 1954, the Indian government honoured him with India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna.