Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995) was an absolutely amazing astrophysicist. He studied a physics degree in India (graduating in 1930) and did so well that he was awarded an Indian government scholarship to study in Trinity College, Cambridge. He obtained his PhD in Cambridge (graduating 1933) whilst mingling with the likes of Dirac, Eddington, Milne and Bohr. After his PhD he remained in Trinity for a few years before moving to Chicago where he would remain for the rest of his life.
Throughout his career he worked in many areas of astrophysics but what perhaps impresses me the most is his discovery of a maximum allowable mass for white dwarfs (named in his honour) while on a boat to England from India! Apparently he became ill (or so i’m told) and was confined to his cabin and so kept his time productive by making ground breaking discoveries in theoretical astrophysics!
He also had a policy of switching his research interests every decade or so. He strongly advised others to do this also. He said that this was especially important if one had been successful in a particular area. That might sound unusual but Chandrasekar was able to stay fresh and discover a vast array of things in varying fields – very impressive I think! Throughout his career he studied white dwarfs, stellar dynamics, radiative transfer, quantum theory of negative H ion, general relativity, black holes, gravitational waves and geometric arguments in Newton’s Prinicipia. He also managed to find time to collect a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983.
A true genius.
