To be exact, it's a joint work of Mandelstam and Landsberg that was published ONE WEEK (!) earlier that the work of Raman and Krishnan. See more at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Mandelstam

BTW, it's called "the combinatorial scattering". But it is more known as the Raman effect.

There are a number of parallels, actually. For example, the sampling theorem of Nyquist is known as the KotelnIkov theorem in the Russian literature...

To be exact, it's a joint work of Mandelstam and Landsberg that was published ONE WEEK (!) earlier that the work of Raman and Krishnan. See more at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Mandelstam

BTW, it's called "the combinatorial scattering". But it is more known as the Raman effect.

There are a number of parallels, actually. For example, the sampling theorem of Nyquist is known as the KotelnIkov theorem in the Russian literature...

Alexander, and why you call it Raman dispersion, common term is, as far as I know, Raman scattering (or combinational scattering)?

Dear Serge you gave the good answer!

Dear Aleksandr you asked a good question!

Certainly, I know the correct terminology of Raman scattering. As the proof my participation (report) in the conference “combinatorial scattering - 70 years of researches” which took place in Moscow in 1998 in FIAN. In G. S. Landsberg's "Optics" there is head devoted to the nonlinear phenomena and light self-focusing. Self-focusing was discovered by my research supervisor G. A. Askaryan.

Certainly, it isn't good to be mistaken in terms. However, I used the mathematical concept "dispersion" not incidentally.

I had begun to investigate long ago light dispersion in lasers, at first as the experimenter, then as the theorist, then as the mathematician. The mathematician E.E. Shnol told that such sometimes happens.

Shortly (and simply) it is a question here of what. Historically it developed that Gaussian distribution was received by Moivre and Laplace from binomial distribution. And we could obtain binomial distribution, in turn, from Pascal's triangle and Newton binomial. If there is a Gaussian distribution, it is possible to speak about dispersion.

Investigating geometry of distribution of beams, I came across the second, nonlinear, a binomial (not Newton), nonlinear arithmetic triangles and a nonlinear arithmetic pyramid. Therefore, and distribution in a limit case will be not Gaussian, though in a form too bell-shaped. And dispersions are different, etc., etc.

My works can be found, for example, in Research Gate.

Thank you, Alexander, excuse me for invading the discussion of theorists. Being an experimentalist, I can only evaluate the beauty of mind whirl, but ...it it all

This is an interesting question.  There is a bit more to the story.

Apparently, Adolf Gustav Stephan Smekal (September 12, 1895, Vienna, Austria — March 7, 1959, Graz, Austria), an Austrian theoretical physicist, with interests in solid state physics, is known for the prediction of the inelastic scattering of photons (Smekal-Raman effect).    Raman scattering was predicted theoretically by Smekal in 1923.  See

Smekal, A. (1923). "Zur Quantentheorie der Dispersion". Naturwissenschaften 11 (43): 873–875.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01576902?LI=true#page-1

Raman's full name is Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, FRS[2] (7 November 1888 – 21 November 1970), who was an Indian physicist whose ground breaking work in the field of light scattering earned him the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physics. He discovered that, when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light changes in wavelength. This phenomenon is now called Raman scattering and is the result of the Raman effect.

Alexander, Thank you for introducing your beloved mentor, Gurgen Askaryan.  We share the same Armenian heritage.  My late great uncle Haig Yazmadjian (my grandmother's brother) was a well-known psychiatrist in St. Petersburg and visited us in Canada when I was a girl.  Although he could not speak English, he understood the chess game he watched when I won against my older Armenian cousin!

Interesting read! Thanx!

It is amazing that these two intellectuals came within a week of each other in publishing this phenomenally relevant work during their challenging times. Mandelstam in communist USSR under Stalin and Sir CV Raman in imperial India under the British Raj (yoke). About the same time as the Braggs for X-ray spectroscopy. Without the Internet, Cell Phones or TV! By all rights, it ought to be called Mandelstam and Landsberg Dispersimetery or Spectrometery. I notice none of you emoters have yet claimed this. Looks like Raman was the better protagonist & linguist :-) Besides, Raman may have been easier to pronounce/spell perhaps?

I bet you Raman writing in English rather than in Russian or German in those days must have contributed as well. More Scientists back then were familiar with English than Russian or German as now.

"Raman received the Nobel prize in a record time of two years after his prize- winning discovery. Several questions have been raised about not sharing of the prize by Raman either with his colleagues or the Russian scientists. It will be shown here that it was not in Raman's hand to take this decision. The reasons for these are elaborated in this paper."

http://materials.iisc.ernet.in/tag/sir-c-v-raman/

http://www.iisc.ernet.in/~currsci/nov10/articles33.htm

http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/cvraman/raman1.htm

https://www.flickr.com/photos/85210325@N04/11604959265/in/album-72157645018820696/