Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

This article is about the Indian-American physicist. For other uses of Chandra, please see Chandra (disambiguation). For the film director, see Jay Chandrasekhar Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Lahore now in Pakistan, October 19, 1910 – August 21, 1995, Chicago, Illinois, United States) was an Indian-American physicist, astrophysicist and mathematician, known to the world as Chandra, who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with William Alfred Fowler).

He was one of the more distinguished of the ten children of CS Iyer who was a senior Railway official in pre-Independence India, an accomplished Carnatic music violinist from the Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu who authored several authentic books on South Indian musicology. He was posted in Lahore at the time of Chandra's birth. Chandrasekhar was the nephew of Nobel-prize winning physicist C. V. Raman, whose father (Chandra's paternal grandfather) was Chandrasekhara Iyer, the name Chandrasekhara repeating itself in alternate generations on the paternal side, according to Hindu custom.

He served on the University of Chicago faculty from 1937 until his death in 1995 at the age of 84. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1953.

Early life

Chandrasekhar had most of his school career and his entire college career in Madras (now Chennai), having attended the PS High School and then the Presidency College from which he graduated with a degree in physics. He received his doctorate (1933) from, and was also a research fellow at, Trinity College, Cambridge in England.

In addition to mathematics, Chandrasekhar, as a youth, also mastered German, devoured everything from Shakespeare to Hardy, and could read up to 100 pages in an hour "quite easily".

During World War II, Chandrashekhar was called on to work on the top-secret atomic weapons research going on at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, where he collaborated with many prominent physicists including Enrico Fermi.

Nobel prize

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his studies on the physical processes important to the structure and evolution of stars, though he was upset that the citation mentioned only his earliest work, seeing this as a denigration of a lifetime's achievement. It is not certain if the Nobel selection committee was at least remotely influenced in formulating this citation by the early criticisms of Eddington, another distinguished astrophysicst of his times and a senior to him. His lifetime's achievement may be glimpsed in the footnotes to his Nobel lecture.

Legacy

In 1999, NASA named the third of its four "Great Observatories'" after Chandrasekhar. This followed a naming contest which attracted 6,000 entries from fifty states and sixty-one countries. The Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999.

The asteroid 1958 Chandra is named after Chandrasekhar, as is the Chandrasekhar limit. The limit was first discovered and calculated by Chandrasekhar whilst on a ship, on his way from India to Cambridge, England, where he was to study under the eminent astrophysicist, R. Fowler. When Chandrasekhar first proposed his ideas, he was opposed by the British physicist Arthur Eddington, and this had probably played a part in his decision to move to the University of Chicago in the United States.

Awards

References

Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes, Arthur I. Miller, Little Brown, 2005
The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, Clarendon, 1998
Chandra - A Biography of S.Chandrasekhar, Kameshwar C. Wali, University of Chicago Press, 1992

External links