S Chandrasekhar: Google honours him today on his anniversary.
S Chandrasekhar: Google honours him today
Described as a “child prodigy” and hailed as the first astrophysicist to win a Nobel Prize for his theory on the evolution of stars, Diwali on Thursday would have been Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s 107th birthday.
In his honour, Google is changing its logo in 28 countries to a doodle, or illustration, of him and the Chandrasekhar Limit.
But in his lifetime, the Indian American astrophysicist was not always recognised for his achievements. This is his story:
Intellectual family
Born in Lahore in 1910 to a Tamil family, Chandrasekhar was home tutored until age 12.
In his autobiography, Chandrasekhar referred to his mother as “My mother Sita was a woman of high intellectual attainments”.His uncle, Sir CV Raman, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930. Also in 1930, Chandrasekhar completed his bachelor’s degree in physics at the Presidency College in Madras, India (known today as Chennai).
Chandrasekhar was then awarded a scholarship by the government of India to pursue graduate studies at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He completed his PhD studies in 1933.
Married to Lalitha Doraiswamy in the southern Indian city of Madras, Chandrasekhar praised his wife’s “patient understanding, support, and encouragement” and called those the “central facts of my life”.
