the time in Copenhagen Chandra succeeded in convincing himself that his real strength lay in developing and expounding the implications of the basic physical laws of nature as distinct from the pursuit of new laws of nature. He found an interested and appreciative audience in the physics community for his work on degenerate stars. Chandra was invited to the University of Liege to lecture on his work, following which he was presented with a bronze medal. The overall experience of the year was to ease his mind and set him firmly on a path in theoretical astrophysics.

Chandra finished the year with four papers on rotating self-gravitating polytropes, which became his Ph.D. thesis. His government scholarship ran out in August 1933 and the question was what to do next. It was clear that there were no opportunities in India unless he rode on the coattails of his uncle Raman, which he was loathe to do. Fortunately he won one of the highly competitive appointments as a fellow of Trinity College, which ran for four years. Milne nominated Chandra for fellow of the RAS, and the future was clear for the immediate years at Cambridge. At the monthly meetings in Burlington House Chandra and such contemporaries as William McCrea generally sat in the back row, but became acquainted with some of the denizens of the front row (e.g., Sir James Jeans, Sir Arthur Eddington, Sir Frank Dyson, and such international visitors as Henry Norris Russell and Harlow Shapley).

Chandra spent four weeks in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1934 at the invitation of B. P. Gerasimovic, meeting L. D. Landau and V. A. Ambartsumian, along with many other enthusiastic young men. Unhappily only Landau and Ambartsumian survived the massive purges that were soon to follow. Ambartsumian grasped the significance of Chandra's work on dwarf stars and suggested that it was worth working out exactly (i.e., by direct radial integration of the exact