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Mathematical physicist par excellence

Kameshwar C. Wali, Chandra: A Biography of S. Chandrasekhar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. x + 341, £13.50. ISBN 0226-87055-3 One of the passengers on board the steamship Lloyd Triestino that left Bombay on 31 July 1930 bound for London was a young Indian expecting to register as a Ph.D. student at Cambridge in the Michaelmas Term, to work under the supervision of the eminent mathematical physicist R.H. Fowler (see the paper by W.H. McCrea, Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 47, 61-78, 1993). Not yet 20, the young man had already shown his brilliance as a mathematician and his interest and ability in science and scholarship. Armed with Eddington’s The Internal Constitution of the Stars, Compton’s X-rays and Electrons and Sommerfeld’s Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines, he undertook during the voyage the task of including special relativistic effects in Fowler’s theory of white dwarf stars. He thus discovered an apparent upper limit to the mass of a star that could collapse into the white dwarf state. Stars more massive than this limit could not evolve into that state. The great importance of this finding and its manifold ramifications were later fully appreciated by theoretical astrophysicists and subsequently accorded formal recognition by the Nobel Prize Committee in making its physics awards for 1983. But the initial rejection of the result by Eddington and other ‘stalwarts of the day’ had a profound effect on Chandra’s subsequent career, most of which (since 1937) has been spent at the University of Chicago, where he continues to work on scientific problems.