Alachua Astronomy Club, Inc.	Member Astronomical League	Member International Dark-Sky Association
	FirstLight's First Ten Years
	29°39' N,  82°21' W Altitude: 50 Meters (more or less)		Updated Jan. 17, 1999
(Click logo for home page)	Founded: September 1987		(Developed with Netscape 4.x)

Club Address

Club Info

Club Meetings

Star Parties

Special Events

Club News

Astro News

What's Up

UF Ast Dept

Astro Links

Passing of a Giant

by Howard L. Cohen
Nobel Prize Winner S. Chandrasekhar leaves a legacy of supernovae, white dwarfs and black holes.
His life remains a model for all who aspire to understand our universe.

One of the greatest intellectuals of the ages is dead at the age of 84. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, died of heart failure Monday, August 21 at the University of Chicago Hospitals. Nobel Prize winner and developer of the theory of white dwarfs and other compact objects (now called neutron stars and black holes), Chandrasekhar was an intellectual beyond compare. Revered by his students and honored by his colleagues for his leading contributions to the fundamental understanding of stellar structure, he was one of the greatest astrophysicists of all time. He was a member of the University of Chicago for nearly 60 years where both his understanding of basic concepts of science, his enormous breadth of knowledge of diverse disciplines, and incredible productivity made people speak his name in almost godlike fashion. He was devoted to science and his students. Although scorned for his early theories of collapsed objects and challenged by encounters with racial prejudice, Chandrasekhar toiled tirelessly to teach and understand nature. His efforts earned him twenty honorary degrees and election to twenty-one learned societies while winning many coveted awards besides the Nobel Prize in physics (1983). Previously (1957) two of his students, T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang had won a Nobel Prize, thus confirming his care for others, talent for communication, and commitment to his profession.

Chandrasekhar's birthplace was Lahore, in colonial India. The year was 1910, the same year well-known for the apparition of Comet Halley. His grandfather was a scholar, his father a civil servant, and his Uncle, C.V. Raman, a Nobel Prize winner himself. Chandra, as his friends and colleagues called him, did his postgraduate work at Cambridge University in England. Thereafter, Chandrasekhar spent most of his life affiliated with the University of Chicago. He became a U.S. citizen in 1953. His wife, Lalitha, of Hyde Park in Chicago, and two brothers and three sisters in England, survive him.

The University of Chicago Astronomy Department has set up a memorial site for Chandra. Here you can learn more about this unique individual, a man the scientific community will long mourn and honor. Here, too, you can read University of Chicago Press and Reuter's News Service press releases about his death, and reflect on the thoughts of those who were privileged to know him. If you do not have access to the Web, you can read his biography, Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar by Kameshwar Wali (University of Chicago Press, 1991).

Then go buy Chandrasekhar's last book, just published this summer, Newton's Principia for the Common Reader (published by Clarendon Press of Oxford University, ISBN: 0-19851744-0). Here he tries to show the genius of Isaac Newton by translating Newton's masterpiece into the language of modern mathematics, which he knew so well. Realize in reading Chandrasekhar's book, that the author himself could be the Isaac Newton of our century.

(Material for the above article partially taken from Web pages of the University of Chicago's Department of Astronomy.)

	Return to AAC Home Page
	For comments and suggestions send e-mail to webmaster@floridastars.org © Copyright 2000-2003 Alachua Astronomy Club, Inc.