Lalitha Chandrasekhar

Lalitha Chandrasekhar was born in Egmore, India, a suburb of Madras, on Oct. 15, 1910.

She and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar were fellow students in the physics department at the University of Madras between 1927 and 1929. She received her B.A. honors degree in physics (the U.S. equivalent of a master’s degree) in 1930 and her Licentiate in Teaching degree in 1931 from the Lady Willingdon Training College in Madras. For a year, she taught physics, chemistry and mathematics at the National High School in Madras.

She married Subrahamyan Chandrasekhar on Sept. 11, 1936. Mrs. Chandra attended most of the lectures her husband delivered in various parts of the world during his long career. She shared a keen lifelong interest in music with her husband and would often sing to him. Mrs. Chandra also played the vina, an Indian stringed instrument, and the flute.

Off and on over the years, Mrs. Chandra has written essays on a variety of subjects but mainly about her husband. After Chandra’s death, the University of Chicago Press decided to publish posthumously S. Chandrasekhar Selected Papers, Vol. 7, 1997, with material that Chandra himself had collected for that purpose. The editors of the Press invited Mrs. Chandra to write the foreword for Part II of the volume.

“I was delighted to do it and have it appear in print,” Mrs. Chandra said. “My long-suppressed desire to write was finally coming to fruition!”

In quick succession came Kameshwar Wali’s request that she write an article for his forthcoming book, S. Chandrasekhar, The Man Behind the Legend, published by Imperial College Press of London, England, in 1997. The result was her article “My Everlasting Flame.”

The next opportunity came following a symposium held in Chandra’s honor in December 1996, organized by Robert Wald, Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago. Mrs. Chandra presented the symposium’s after-banquet talk. A longer version of her 15-minute talk, titled “Our Song,” appeared in Black Holes and Relativistic Stars, edited by Wald and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1998.