Dr s chandrasekhar biography of donald

Described as a “child prodigy” and hailed as the first astrophysicist to win the Nobel Prize for a theory on the evolution of stars, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar would have been  on Diwali this Thursday.

In his honour, Google is changing its logo in 28 countries to a doodle, or illustration, of him and the Chandrasekhar Limit.

But in his lifetime, the Indian American astrophysicist was not always recognised for his achievements. This is his story:

Intellectual family

• Born in Lahore in to a Tamil family, Chandra was home tutored until age
• In his autobiography, Chandrasekhar referred to his mother as “My mother Sita was a woman of high intellectual attainments.”
• His uncle, Sir CV Raman, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in
• Also in , Chandrasekhar completed his bachelor’s degree in physics at the Presidency College in Madras, India (known today as Chennai).

• Chandrasekhar was then awarded a scholarship by the government of India to

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  Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

  Indian-American physicist ()

  Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (;^[3] 19 October – 21 August )^[4] was an Indian-Americantheoretical physicist who made significant contributions to the scientific knowledge about the structure of stars, stellar evolution and black holes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics along with William A. Fowler for theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars. His mathematical treatment of stellar evolution yielded many of the current theoretical models of the later evolutionary stages of massive stars and black holes.^[5][6] Many concepts, institutions and inventions, including the Chandrasekhar limit and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, are named after him.^[7]

  Chandrasekhar worked on a wide variety of problems in physics during his lifetime, contributing to the contemporary understanding of stellar structure, white dwarfs,

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  Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar—child prodigy, predictor of black holes, Nobelist, and UChicago professor for nearly 60 years—often distilled his life into two sentences: “I left India and went to England in I returned to India in and married a girl who had been waiting for six years, came to Chicago, and lived happily thereafter.”

  Chandrasekhar is best known for the earliest part of his career, when he determined the fate of massive stars and was betrayed by a mentor. Yet he spent the next six decades making equally influential breakthroughs in stellar structure and dynamics, and training a new generation of astrophysicists. He also faced discrimination and alienation, elided from the fairy-tale ending he liked to recount.

  Chandra, as he was known, was born in in Lahore—then British India, now Pakistan—the third of 10 children. In Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar (University of Chicago Press, ) his biographer Kameshwar C. Wali, a UChicago physicist in the late ’60s, des

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