Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Chandrasekhar was born on 19 October 1910 in Lahore, Punjab, India to a Tamil Iyer family Sitalakshmi (1891–1931) and Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Iyer (1885–1960) who was posted in Lahore as Deputy Auditor General of the Northwestern Railways at the time of Chandrasekhar's birth. He was the eldest of their four sons and the third of their ten children. His paternal uncle was the Indian physicist and Nobel laureate C. V. Raman. C. S. Iyer. His mother was devoted to intellectual pursuits, had translated Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House into Tamil and is credited with arousing Chandra's intellectual curiosity at an early age.

Chandrasekhar was tutored at home initially through middle school and later attended the Hindu High School, Triplicane, Madras during the years 1922-25. Subsequently, he studied at Presidency College, Madras from 1925 to 1930, writing his first paper, "The Compton Scattering and the New Statistics", in 1929 upon inspiration from a lecture by Arnold Sommerfeld and obtaining his bachelor's degree, B.Sc. (Hon.), in physics in June 1930. In July 1930, Chandrasekhar was awarded a Government of India scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where he was admitted to Trinity College, secured by Professor R. H. Fowler with whom he communicated his first paper. During his travels to England, Chandrasekhar spent his time working out the statistical mechanics of the degenerate electron gas in white dwarf stars, providing relativistic corrections to Fowler's previous work (see Legacy below).

In his first year at Cambridge, as a research student of Fowler, Chandrasekhar spent his time in intensive study, calculating mean opacities and applying his results to the construction of an improved model for the limiting mass of the degenerate star, and was introduced to the monthly meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society, where he met Professor E. A. Milne. At the invitation of Max Born he spent the summer of 1931, his second year of post-graduate studies, at Born’s institute at Göttingen, working on opacities, atomic absorption coefficients, and model stellar photospheres. On the advice of Prof. P. A. M. Dirac, he spent his final year of graduate studies at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, where he met Prof. Niels Bohr. After receiving a bronze medal for his work on degenerate stars, in the summer of 1933, Chandrasekhar was awarded his PhD degree at Cambridge with a thesis among his four papers on rotating self-gravitating polytropes, and the following October, he was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College for the period 1933-37. During this time, he made acquaintance with Sir Arthur Eddington. Chandrasekhar married Lalitha Doraiswamy in September 1936. He had met her as a fellow student, a year junior to him, at Presidency College, Madras. In his Nobel autobiography, Chandrasekhar wrote, "Lalitha's patient understanding, support, and encouragement have been the central facts of my life."

Chandrasekhar's infamous encounter with Arthur Eddington in 1935, in which the latter publicly ridiculed Chandra's most famous (and ultimately correct) discovery (see Chandrasekhar limit) led Chandra to consider employment outside of the U.K. (Later in life, Chandra on multiple occasions, expressed the view that Eddington's behavior was in part racially motivated.)