Sadhan Basu

Fulbright fellow in chemistry at the Indiana University Bloomington, where he developed an interest in the emerging field of quantum chemistry. Upon returning to India, he published six papers on free electron molecular orbital calculations.^[7]

-NH2 group in nylon, he developed a methodology which has since been accepted as a standard industrial procedure. He calculated the transition energies and oscillator strengths of aromatic polyhydrocarbons using the gas model prescribed by Shin'ichirō Tomonaga in 1950. He thus demonstrated that extended catacondensed planar structures could be derived only by using 3-4-6 membered rings and employing the Hartree-Fock and Bogolyubov methods, illustrated that, unlike triplet transitions, the longest wavelength singlet transitions in linear polyenes converge to a limit.^[1] Basu's research was published in a number of articles and the article, Degree of Polymerization and Chain Transfer in Methyl Methacrylate, he and his co-authors, J. N. Sen and S. R. Palit, published in 1950 was the first Indian article on polymer chemistry.^[11] He was associated with the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, the Indian Journal of Chemistry and the Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy as their associate editor. He mentored a number of students in their doctoral research.^[12][13]

Rajabazar Science College or University College of Science & Technology in 1964,^[14] the chair of which he held until his superannuation and retirement. He also served as the head of the university's chemistry department from 1978 to 1980.^[7] In 1981, he was appointed the director of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, but relinquished the post in 1982 due to ill health.^[15][16] He also served the Indian National Science Academy council during 1982-84 as a member.^[17][18] Basu retired from the University of Calcutta in 1985,^[7] and died on 5 October 1992, at the age of 70.^[2] He was survived by his wife, Rama Basu, who was also a theoretical chemist, and their son and daughter.^[6][7] His scientific contributions have been documented in an article, Sadhan Basu — a physical chemist extraordinaire, published in the Resonance journal in 2013.^[6]

Royal Society for Chemistry.^[7] He was also a fellow of the Indian Chemical Society and the Society of Physical Chemistry of France. The Indian Academy of Sciences issued a festschrift, Dedicated to Prof. Sadhan Basu on the occasion of his sixtyfifth birthday, on him in 1986 on his 65th birth anniversary.^[20] The contributors included Jack Simons, Debashis Mukherjee, Werner Kutzelnigg and George G. Hall among others.^[21] The Indian National Science Academy has instituted an annual oration, Professor Sadhan Basu Memorial Lecture in his honor^[22][23] and the University of Kolkata recognizes excellence in research in chemistry each year by an annual award, the Professor Sadhan Basu Memorial Award.^[24]