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Born #OTD 1910: The great astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar ("Chandra") who discovered a mass limit for white dwarfs, paving the way to neutron stars and black holes. Chandra's mastery of the mathematics of astrophysical phenomena was unparalleled.
Chandra’s life and career were a study in fortitude and rigor http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2016/10/subrahmanyan-chandrasekhar-study-in.html
Chandra was friend and mentor to many of the 20th century's leading physicists. In 1956, he used to drive 2 hours from Yerkes Observatory to the University of Chicago every week to teach a class of just two - CN Yang and TD Lee. The next year the entire class won the Nobel Prize.
In 2010, at a symposium honoring Chandra's contributions at the University of Chicago (among other things, the x-ray telescope Chandra is named after him), Freeman Dyson talked about the momentous impact of the 19-year-old's calculations on white dwarfs, done on a boat to England
A sophisticated and highly cultured man (Hans Bethe called his accent the most perfect upper-class English accent he had heard), he possessed great appreciation for beauty in science, music, literature and art. His essays on truth and beauty are excellent https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Beauty-Aesthetics-Motivations-Science/dp/0226100863/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476917906&sr=1-1&keywords=subrahmanyan+chandrasekhar
Chandra was proud of both his Indian roots and his adopted country. He and his wife Lalitha were proud immigrants who wrote a heartfelt letter to Chandra's father in 1953 saying that they needed to become citizens to participate in their country's democratic process.
