Abstract

Chandra’s academic life had several phases each culminating in a monograph describing that subject. I shall deal with aspects of his work in the two earliest phases. I shall describe the overall structure of statistical mechanics of gravitating systems, the relevance of isothermal sphere in the mean-field approximation and issues related to collisional relaxation and dynamical friction in self-gravitating system of particles. There are several curious features in the history of these topics which I comment upon.

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