Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

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**Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar** <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Image:Chandrasekhar.gif
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar</td></tr>
Born	19 October 1910 Lahore, India <tr><th>Died</th><td>21 August 1995 Chicago, Illinois, USA</td></tr><tr><th>Residence</th><td>Image:Flag of the United States.svg USA</td></tr><tr><th>Nationality</th><td>Image:Flag of the United States.svg American</td></tr><tr><th>Field</th><td>Physicist</td></tr><tr><th>Institution</th><td>Cambridge</br>University of Chicago</td></tr><tr><th>Alma Mater</th><td>Presidency College</br>Cambridge</td></tr><tr><th>Academic Advisor</th><td>Arthur Eddington</td></tr><tr><th>Notable Students</th><td>Russell Kulsrud</br>Norman Lebovitz </br> Guido Muench-Paniagua</td></tr><tr><th>Known for</th><td>Chandrasekhar limit</td></tr><tr><th>Notable Prizes</th><td>Image:Nobel.png Nobel Prize in Physics (1983)</td></tr>

"Chandrasekhar" redirects here. For the film director, see Jay Chandrasekhar. For the Prime Minister of India, see Chandra Shekhar.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (October 19, 1910, (Lahore, India, (now Pakistan), – 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 in South India.

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.

1 Early life
2 Nobel prize
3 Legacy
4 Awards
5 References
6 External links

[edit] 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 the United Kingdom.

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.

[edit] 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 Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, another distinguished astrophysicst of his time and a senior to him. His lifetime's achievement may be glimpsed in the footnotes to his Nobel lecture. Chandrasekar's familly to this date still lives in Madras. In fact the "last name subramanyan" is still in existence says Sreekant Subramanian, Chandrasekars great great great grandson. Although the name still exists the name has now changed to Subramanian with a partial difference in spelling.

[edit] Legacy

Chandrasekhar's most famous success was the astrophysical Chandrasekhar limit. The limit describes the maximum mass (~1.44 solar masses) of a white dwarf star, or equivalently, the minimum mass for which a star will ultimately collapse into a neutron star or black hole (following a supernova). The limit was first calculated by Chandrasekhar while on a ship from India to Cambridge, England, where he was to study under the eminent astrophysicist, Sir Ralph Howard Fowler. When Chandrasekhar first proposed his ideas, he was opposed by the British physicist Arthur Eddington, and this may have played a part in his decision to move to the University of Chicago in the United States.

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 also named after Chandrasekhar.

In 2006, the legendary Detroit electronic music pioneer Gerald Donald, under his Arpanet alias, released a song called "Chandrasekhars Limit". It is on the Inertial Frame LP.

[edit] Awards

[edit] References

Chandrasekhar, S. [1983] (1998). The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-850370-9.
Miller, Arthur I. (2005). Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession, and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-618-34151-X.
Wali, Kameshwar C. (1991). Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-87054-5.