Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910 – 1995) was an Indian-American astrophysicist who spent his professional life in the United States. Among the many awards are the Nobel Prize for Physics (1983) and Padma Vibhushan (1968).
Chandrasekhar's most notable work is on the astrophysical Chandrasekhar limit.
Chandra’s commitment to teaching was legendary. In the 1940s, he drove 200 miles round trip each week from Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisc., to the University to teach a class on stellar atmospheres. One day he insisted on driving from Yerkes to teach the class despite a heavy snowstorm. Chandra ended up teaching a class of only two that day. The two students––Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang––won the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics, obtaining the distinction even before their professor.
Chandrasekhar supervised 45 PhD students. After his death, his widow Lalitha Chandrasekhar made a gift of his Nobel Prize money to the University of Chicago towards the establishment of the Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Memorial Fellowship.
Chandrasekhar was born on 19 October 1910 in Lahore. The family moved from Lahore to Allahabad in 1916, and finally settled in Madras in 1918.
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 until the age of 12. In middle school his father taught him Mathematics and Physics and his mother taught him Tamil.
He was a vegetarian and atheist.