Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Chandrasekhar was the third of ten children born to Sita Ayyar and Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyar, a senior officer in the Indian Audits and Accounts Department, who was posted in
Lahore as the Deputy Auditor General of the Northwestern Railways. Chandrasekhar's mother was devoted to intellectual pursuits and had translated Henrik Ibsen's
A Doll House into
Tamil. His father was an accomplished
Carnatic music violinist who had authored several books on
musicology. Chandrasekhar was the nephew of Nobel-prize winning physicist
C. V. Raman.
Chandrasekhar attended the Hindu High School,
Triplicane,
Madras,
British India during the years 1922-25. Subsequently, he studied at
Presidency College from 1925 to 1930, obtaining his bachelor's degree, B.Sc. (Hon.), in physics in June 1930. In July 1930, Chandrasekhar was awarded a Government of India scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the
University of Cambridge, where he became a research student of Professor
R. H. Fowler, and was admitted to
Trinity College. On the advice of Prof.
P. A. M. Dirac, Chandrasekhar spent a year at the
Institut for Teoretisk Fysik in
Copenhagen, where he met Prof.
Niels Bohr.
In the summer of 1933, Chandrasekhar was awarded his Ph.D. degree at Cambridge, and the following October, he was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College for the period 1933-37. During this time, he formed friendships with Sir
Arthur Eddington and Professor
E. A. Milne.
In September 1936, Chandrasekhar married Lalitha Doraiswamy, who he had met as a fellow student at Presidency College, Madras, and who was a year junior to him. In his Nobel autobiography, Chandrasekhar wrote, "Lalitha's patient understanding, support, and encouragement have been the central facts of my life."
The following year (January 1937), Chandrasekhar was recruited to the
University of Chicago faculty as Assistant Professor by Dr.
Otto Struve and President
Robert Maynard Hutchins. He was to remain at the university for his entire career, becoming Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics in 1952 and attaining emeritus status in 1985.
In the 1950s he investigated plasma physics and hydrodynamics and concentrated on the stability of a variety of magnetic fluid configurations. Much of his work in this area is to be found in
Hydrodynamic and Hydromagnetic Stability (Clarendon Press, 1961), which has been a benchmark since its first appearance. Chandra next directed his attention to the classical problem of the stability of rotating ellipsoidal figures. The results in the framework of Newtonian mechanics and gravitation were organized in the monograph
Ellipsoidal Figures of Equilibrium (Yale University Press, 1968). This line of thought brought him to the gravitational theory of general relativity, with which he treated stellar pulsations, discovering the relativistic instability of radial oscillations of white dwarf stars, and the Chandrasekhar-Friedman-Schutz instability, which has ultimately developed into a mechanism for the gravitational wave emission of black holes. The dynamical properties of the rotating black hole were expounded by Chandra in
The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes (Oxford University Press, 1983). His discoveries did not stop there. In his subsequent work with Valeria Ferrari on exact solutions of the equations of general relativity, the singularities that arise in interacting gravitational waves came to light. Chandra also developed the post-Newtonian approximation that has become the standard formal approach to calculating the gravitational waves from dynamical systems of massive particles and has served as the basis for the post-post-Newtonian formalism.
Chandra accomplished the difficult task of a formal general-relativistic treatment of the instability of radial stellar pulsations in
recent work with Ferrari, and the final paper was essentially finished at the time of his death. The problem is of particular interest because without the emission of gravitational waves (that is, in Newtonian gravitation) the system is stable unless some other form of dissipation is introduced. In his last years Chandra became increasingly interested in Newton's
Principia. He published his review of Newton's work in a monograph,
Newton's Principia for the Common Reader (Oxford University Press), which appeared just two months before his death.
Chandra's book
Truth and Beauty (University of Chicago Press), published in 1987, contains a number of essays, including his well-known Ryerson Lecture, "Shakespeare, Newton and Beethoven," which is only one of his explorations of the motivations, ambitions and aesthetic rewards of the artist and the scientist.
Chandra served as editor of the
Astrophysical Journal from 1952 to 1971, transforming it from a more or less private journal of the University of Chicago into the national journal of the American Astronomical Society, still published by the University of Chicago Press.
Chandra 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.
Chandra's own death on 21 August 1995 at the age of almost 85 marked the passing of an era in which physicists first reached inward to understand the atom and the fundamental particles and outward to embrace the stars. Chandra never wavered in his pursuit of the physics of the stellar object in its diverse forms.
Wikipedia and Eugene N. Parker
