Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Chandrasekhar’s intellectual temperament combined patience with discipline. Born in 1910 in Lahore and trained in Madras and Cambridge, he traveled to England with calculations on the relativistic degeneracy of electrons in compact stars. On shipboard he refined the argument: that Fermi–Dirac statistics and special relativity impose a maximum mass for a stable white dwarf. Above roughly 1.4 solar masses, electron degeneracy pressure fails; gravitational collapse must proceed to a denser fate. Eddington, then the great authority, publicly criticized the conclusion in 1935, suggesting that nature would avoid the paradox. The dispute was bruising, shaping Chandrasekhar’s resolve to avoid polemics and to let rigorous, book‑length syntheses speak. At the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory and later the Physics Department, Chandra organized his career into thematic decades: radiative transfer (the foundational 1950 monograph), hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic stability (1961), stellar dynamics (1942), and then, astonishingly late in life, black hole mathematics. Each monograph is both textbook and research program, laying down exact methods, illuminating asymptotics, and indicating open problems. His work on the separability of the Teukolsky equation in the Kerr background and the nature of gravitational perturbations exemplifies a mathematician’s aesthetic married to a physicist’s judgment. Students and colleagues found him demanding but unfailingly courteous; his lectures, precisely prepared, could feel like crafted proofs. Recognition caught up. In 1983 he received the Nobel Prize “for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars,” shared with William Fowler. Honors aside, Chandrasekhar’s legacy is a way of doing science: to choose important problems; to attack them with the best mathematics available; to write clearly and completely. He edited the Astrophysical Journal with similar standards, believing that a serious literature is as vital as a serious lab. His marriage to Lalitha and his devotion to music and literature rounded a life that resisted caricature. For students who worry that fashion drives science, Chandra offers a different model—fidelity to depth over trend, and the belief that elegance is not ornament but a clue to truth.