Jagdish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) had a pupil —another Bengali also named Bose — Satyendra Nath Bose (1894–1974). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose https://www.bose.res.in/Prof.S.N.Bose-Archive/objects/Masters-Bose.pdf
This even-younger Bose was also a polymath (more so, in my estimation). And it is after this younger Bose that the ‘boson’ subatomic particle is named. (The name was chosen by Paul Dirac in recognition of Bose’s ground work, namely Bose–Einstein statistics and the concept of the Bose–Einstein condensate.)
Born in Calcutta, to Surendranath Bose (who worked in the Engineering Department of the East Indian Railway Company), Satyendra Nath attended the ‘New Indian School’ and the ‘Hindu School’ before acceptance to join the ‘Presidency College’, Calcutta, where one of his teachers was the above-mentioned elder Bose. After gaining his BSc, he moved on to the ‘Science College’, University of Calcutta for his MSc — where he gained the highest marks ever recorded at that institution. He stayed on at the Science College for several more years as a lecturer and research scholar focussing on the Theory of Relativity. In 1921 he moved to become a Reader in the Physics Department of the University of Dakha in (then) East Bengal (now Bangladesh).
It seems that it was while he was presenting a lecture to his students, trying to explain the ‘ultraviolet catastrophe’, that he must have hit on the idea of focussing on the probability of finding particles in the phase space — rather than trying to pinpoint the positions and momenta of the particles. Or as another source puts it, “Bose made an embarrassing statistical error . . . However, it produced correct results, and Bose realized it might not be a mistake at all.”
He adapted the lecture into an article titled “Planck’s Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta” and sent it out for publication (where it was not immediately accepted). He also posted a copy to Albert Einstein — who personally translated it into German and got it published in the journal ‘Zeitschrift für Physik’ in 1924. He then travelled to Europe and for two years was able to work in X-ray and crystallography laboratories, in the company of such luminaries as de Broglie, Marie Curie, and Einstein.
And so “Bose–Einstein statistics” came into being . . . .
