Early Life

  • Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was born on 19 October 1910 in Lahore Pakistan to Sitalakshmi and Subrahmanya Ayyar.
  • Soon, the family moved from Lahore to Allahabad in 1916, and finally settled in Madras in 1918.

    Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
  • His father was an officer in the Department of Audits and Accounts of the Indian Government Services.

Education

  • Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar received his elementary education from his parents and private tutors when he was in Lahore.
  • In 1918 Chandra moved to Chennai where he attended the Hindu High School finishing his secondary school education with honours.
  • Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar then joined the Presidency College, there taking his Bachelor of Science degree in physics with honours.
  • The Royal Society published his first scientific paper, Compton Scattering and the New Statistics, in the Proceedings of the  in 1928. R.H. Fowler at the University of Cambridge accepted him as a research student on the basis of this paper.
  • On the voyage to England, he developed the theory of white dwarf stars, showing that a star of mass greater than 1.45 times the mass of the sun could not become a white dwarf. This limit is now known as the Chandrasekhar limit.
  • Later, he obtained his doctorate in 1933. Soon, Trinity College at Cambridge awarded the Prize Fellowship after receiving his doctorate.

Research & Awards

  • In 1937, he accepted the position of Research Associate at the University of Chicago.
  • Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar stayed at University of Chicago throughout his career, becoming the Morton D. Hall Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1952.
  • In 1952 he established the Astrophysical Journal and was its editor for 19 years. He transformed the local publication of the University of Chicago into the national journal of the American Astronomical Society.
  • He became a US citizen in 1958.
  • Soon, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London and in 1962 received the Society’s Royal Medal.

    Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar receives the National Medal of Science from President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.
    Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar receives the National Medal of Science from President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.
  • Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar also received the US National Medal of Science (1967).
  • The noble committee awarded him the Nobel prize for Physics in 1983 for his theoretical work on the physical processes of importance to the structure of stars and their evolution.
  • Chandra was a popular teacher who guided over fifty students to their Ph.D.s including some who went on to win the Nobel prize themselves!!
  • His research explored nearly all branches of theoretical astrophysics and he published ten books, each covering a different topic, including one on the relationship between art and science.

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