Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910–95) was born on 19 October in Lahore (then a part of British India). He was the eldest son in a family of ten children. Educated initially at home, he later attended Hindu High School, Triplicane, Madras. He completed his BSc in physics at the Presidency College. In 1930, he received a scholarship from the Government of India to study at the University of Cambridge where he worked as a research student under Professor R. H. Fowler. He earned his PhD in 1933 and was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College. In 1937, Chandrasekhar joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, with William A. Fowler, in 1983 ‘for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars’.