Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (October 19, 1910, Lahore, 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. He was one of the more distinguished of the ten children of CS Iyer who was an ICS ( member of the Indian Civil Service, topmost government service cadre of pre-Independence India), a Carnatic music violinist hailing from the fertile Thanjavur district of Tamilnadu who authored several authentic books on South Indian musicology, and a brother of the Nobel physicist CV Raman. 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

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". Chandrasekhar was the nephew of Nobel-prize winning physicist C. V. Raman.

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 Eddington, another distinguished astrophysicst of his times and a senior to him. His lifetime's achievement may be glimpsed in the footnotes to his .

He served on the University of Chicago faculty from 1937 until

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.

Awards

• Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1949)
• Bruce Medal (1952)
• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1953)
• Henry Draper Medal (1971)
• Nobel Prize in Physics (1983)
• Copley Medal of the Royal Society (1984)

Quotations

• All the standard equations of mathematical physics can be solved in the Kerr spacetime -- from Chandrasekhar's Nobel lecture, in his summary of his work on black holes.

• It is, indeed an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realization in external nature.… What is intelligible is also beautiful. -- from a lecture, "Beauty and the Quest for Beauty in Science," given by Chandrasekhar at the International Symposium in recognition of Robert R. Wilson on 27 April 1979 at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois.

• God is man's greatest invention.

Bibliography

• Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes, Arthur I. Miller, Little Brown, 2005
• The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, Clarendon, 1998
• Chandra - A Biography of S.Chandrasekhar, Kameshwar C. Wali, University of Chicago Press, 1992

Obituaries

• Субрахманиан Чандрасекар

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