Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar October 19, 1910 – August 21, 1995, was an Indian-American physicist, astro-physicist and mathematician, known to the world as Chandra, who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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 accom-plished 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.
Chandrasekhar had most of his school career and his entire college career in Madras, 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.
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. His lifetime’s achievement may be glimpsed in the footnotes to his Nobel lecture.
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. 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.
He passed away on 21 August 1995.
