Mario Schenberg, Brazil’s most important theoretical physicist,
who researched the formation of supernova stars, was born in
Recife on this date in 1914. In the 1940s, together with Indian
physicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chanrasekhar, he
discovered the Schenberg-Chandrasekhar limit, which is the
maximum mass of the core of a star prior to its gravitational
collapse. Schenberg also made significant contributions to
mathematics vis-a-vis quantum physics, and was widely respected
as a writer and art critic. He was twice elected to be Sao Paolo
state legislator on the Communist ticket; following Brazil’s
1964 military coup d’etat, he was forced into retirement by
presidential decree and was jailed for several months (his
second jailing for communist activism). He also received death
threats from Brazilian neo-Nazis for his opposition to a joint
Brazil-Germany plan to build nuclear power stations in Brazil in
1975. Schenberg died in 1990. To view a video about the “Mario
Schenberg Space Ship,” an interac