Shaivism (Tamil: சைவ சித்தாந்தம், śaiva sitthantham, Sanskrit: शैव पंथ, śaiva paṁtha), also known as Shaivam (lit. "associated with Shiva"), is one of the four most widely followed sects of Hinduism, which reveres the god Shiva as the Supreme Being. Followers of Shaivam, called "Shaivas," and also "Saivas" or "Shaivites," believe that Shiva is All and in all, the creator, preserver, destroyer, revealer and concealer of all that is. Shaivism is widespread throughout India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, mostly. Areas notable for the practice of Shaivism include parts of Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.

It is very difficult to determine the early history of Shaivism. The Śvetāśvatara Upanishad (400 - 200 BCE) is the earliest textual exposition of a systematic philosophy of Shaivism. As explained by Gavin Flood, the text proposes:

... a theology which elevates Rudra to the status of supreme being, the Lord (Sanskrit: Īśa) who is transcendent yet also has cosmological functions, as does Śiva in later traditions.

Pran Nath is a theoretical physicist working at Northeastern University, with research focus in elementary particle physics. He holds a Matthews Distinguished University Professor chair.

His main area of research is in the fields of supergravity and particle physics beyond the standard model. He is one of the originators of the first supergravity theory in 1975. In 1982 in collaboration with Richard Arnowitt and Ali Hani Chamseddine, he developed the field of Applied Supergravity and the supergravity grand unification popularly known as SUGRA or mSUGRA model for gravity mediated breaking of supersymmetry. SUGRA models, and specifically mSUGRA, are currently the leading candidates for discovery at the Fermilab Tevatron and at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). He has contributed to further development of the field through studies of CP violation, predictions on muon anomalous moment gμ − 2 ahead of experiment, supersymmetric dark matter, discovery of the hyperbolic branch of radiative breaking of the electroweak symmetry, and detection of supersymmetric signal at colliders via the so called tri-leptonic signal. He has also made contribution to studies on stability of the proton in unified models. His early work concerns the invention of effective Lagrangian method, the first current algebra analysis of pion-pion scattering and solution to the notorious U(1) problem. His recent work has focused SO(10) grand unification, and on the Stueckelberg extensions of the Standard Model. In 1999 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for ”basic contributions in supersymmetry and supergravity”.

Swami Vivekananda (pronounced: IPA: [ʂāmiː biːbeːkānoːnɗoː]  listen (help·info)) (12 January 1863 – 4 July 1902), born Narendra Nath Datta (IPA: [nôreːnd̪roː naːt̪ʰ d̪ôttoː] was the chief disciple of the 19th century saint Ramakrishna and the founder of the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission. He is considered a key figure in the introduction of Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the western world, mainly in America and Europe and is also credited with raising interfaith awareness, bringing Hinduism to the status of a major world religion during the end of the 19th century CE. Vivekananda is considered to be a major force in the revival of Hinduism in modern India. He is perhaps best known for his inspiring speech which began: "Sisters and Brothers of America," through which he introduced Hinduism at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1893.

Swami Vivekananda was born in an aristocratic Bengali Kayastha family of Calcutta on 12 January 1863. Vivekananda's parents influenced his thinking—his father by his rationality and his mother by her religious temperament. From his childhood, he showed an inclination towards spirituality and God realisation. His guru, Ramakrishna, taught him Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism); that all religions are true and that service to man was the most effective worship of God. After the Mahasamadhi of his guru, Vivekananda became a wandering monk, touring the Indian subcontinent and acquiring first-hand knowledge of conditions in India. He later travelled to Chicago and represented India as a delegate in the 1893 Parliament of World Religions. He conducted hundreds of public and private lectures and classes, disseminating Vedanta and Yoga in America, England and Europe. He also established the Vedanta societies in America and England.