Bose was educated at Presidency College, in his native Calcutta. Among his teachers was the eminent Indian physicist Jagadis Chandra Bose. Bose held the post of lecturer at the Calcutta University College of Science from 1917 until he left in 1921 to become a reader in physics at the new University of Dacca in East Bengal. His work ranged over many aspects of physics, among them statistical mechanics, the electromagnetic properties of the ionosphere, theories of x-ray crystallography, and unified field theory. However it is for his work in quantum statistics that he is best known.

Bose attracted the attention of Albert Einstein and other European physicists by publishing a paper in 1924 in which he was able to derive Max Planck's black body radiation law, but without using the classical electrodynamics as Planck himself had done. On the strength of this work Bose was able to get two years' study leave in Europe and during his visit he came into contact with many of the great physicists of the day, such as Louis de Broglie, Max Born, and Einstein. Einstein's generalization of Bose's work led to the system of statistical quantum mechanics now known as Bose–Einstein statistics. This system of statistics contrasts with the rival Fermi–Dirac statistics in that it applies only to particles not limited to single occupancy of the same state, i.e. particles (known as bosons) that do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle.