Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Essay

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Jose Rojas
Astronomy
Mrs.tyas
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
What do we know about this great man who’s’ name is hard to pronounce. Well he was an Indian-American astrophysics who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 for his mathematical theory for black holes. He was born on October 19, 1910 and grew up in Madras where he was encouraged to seek an education to be a government servant like his father but Chandra, his nickname, was a man of science. His mother encouraged him to pursue his dream and he had an excellent role model Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1930, his uncle. Chandra went to Presidency College, University of Madras where he published his first research paper “Proceeding of the Royal Society”. Subra earned a …show more content…

They returned to Cambridge in 1936 but in the following year Chandra joined the faculty at the University of Chicago where he stayed working for the rest of his life. First of he worked in Yerkes Observatory it was a part of the University of Chicago in Wisconsin. Later he moved to work on the university campus in Chicago. During World War II he worked in the Ballistic Research Laboratories at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. Multiple reports, written in 1943, showed the problems he was working on at the time. The first is on the decay of plane shock waves and the second is the normal reflection of a blast wave. He was appointed Morton D Hull distinguished service professor of the University of Chicago in 1952. But by this time Chandra had been working in the United States for 15 years, neither he nor his wife had taken out citizenship earlier. However, both became American citizens in the following year and became very much integrated into the life of the country. When Chandra was offered a chair at Cambridge in 1964 he however was not interested, so he turned down a position which at a young age he would have accepted in a

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