I love reading about the history of science for the sheer joy of immersing vicariously in the epochal discoveries made by brilliant scientists. But what really liven the stories are the subplots – the larger-than-life personalities, the human drama of scientists aiming for greatness, and the quiet dedication of some of these luminaries to teaching that often goes unnoticed. Here’s a story of dedication that needs to be told.

Subrahmanyam Chandrasekhar – better known as Chandra to his friends – was only 20 years old when discovered that a dying star can collapse into some super-dense object (what we now call a neutron star) or maybe even an infinitely dense point (a black hole) when its mass is about 1.4 times the mass of our sun. His seminal discovery of this minimum mass – dubbed the Chandrashekhar limit – was published in the July 1931 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. Despite facing discrimination and alienation, Chandra spent the next six decades making equally influential breakthroughs in stellar structure and dynamics and training a new generation of astrophysicists.

In the 1940s, while he was employed at the Yerkes Observatory at the University of Chicago, Chandra remained committed to his teaching role. Each week, he would travel 80 miles to teach a special course in astrophysics attended by only two students.

The students: T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang, proved their mentor’s faith was well-placed when they both won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957, years before Chandra received the same honor in 1983. Remarkably, this course went down in history as the only one where every attendee received a Nobel Prize, vindicating Chandra’s passion for teaching, and the extraordinary impact his dedication and teaching had on generations of students who came after him.