Author: Kameshwar C Wali
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 1783262648
Category: Science
Page: 236
View: 1531
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar — known simply as Chandra throughout the scientific world — has become a legendary figure for his prolific contributions to physics, astrophysics, and applied mathematics. Before his death in 1995, Chandra had forbidden a memorial of the conventional sort, celebrating his life. This book, which contains some thirty articles by his former students, his associates, and his colleagues, is in a sense a memorial volume. It says little about Chandra's great scientific achievements, but shows his human side and the various facets of his brilliant personality, his incredible memory, his wit, and the breadth of his knowledge of art, music, literature, and the humanities in general. The contributors to this highly interesting book are among the few who broke the seemingly forbidden barrier surrounding the very private Chandra and came to know him well in one context or another. They include Lalitha Chandrasekhar, Roger Penrose, Richard H Dalitz, J W Cronin, Robert G Sachs, Abhay Ashtekar, and Robert Wald. Contents:“My Everlasting Flame” (L Chandrasekhar)S Chandrasekhar: A Personal Portrait (A Ashtekar)Exploring General Relativity with Chandra (V Ferrari)Chandrasekhar and the End of Time (R Penrose)Some Memories of Chandra (R M Wald)Chandra in Focus (S Kumar)Reminiscences of Chandra (J W Cronin)Some Personal Recollections of S Chandrasekhar at Chicago and Oxford (R H Dalitz)A Towering Figure: Reminiscences and Reflections (L Mestel)Reminiscences About Chandra (R G Sachs)and other papers Readership: General. Reviews:“Not a biography, this, but an album of verbal portraits of an austere, proud, cultured and deeply humane astrophysicist.”New Scientist “The present effort is a fine one, and I recommend the book with enthusiasm.”Physics World
