Satyendranath Bose was a physicist whose derivation of Max Planck' s black body radiation law--a fundamental law of quantum theory that is concerned with the concept of energy transfer associated with light, x rays, and other radiations--verified Albert Einstein' s concept of photons and played a major role in the development of quantum statistics and theoretical physics. Einstein used his influence to have Bose's groundbreaking paper published while building upon it to develop a system of quantum statistical mechanics known as Bose-Einstein statistics. As a result of Bose's contribution to the field, bosons--certain subatomic particles of finite mass studied in quantum physics using the Bose-Einstein statistical approach--were named after him.

Although Bose published a relatively low number of original papers throughout his scientific career, his interests in physics and mathematics were wide ranging and included statistical mechanics, electromagnetics, x-ray crystallography, and the unified field theory. Still, Bose failed...