  In their engaging recountals of Chandrasekhar's extraordinary career (Physics
Today, vol 63, Issue 12, Dec 2010), neither Dyson nor Wali mention that
Chandrasekhar was the third person not the first, to publish a white dwarf mass
limit incorporating a relativistic treatment of degenerate electrons. As it has
become a common misconception that Chandrasekhar was the first, a clarifying
reminder on this historical point is warranted. In short, the white dwarf mass
limit widely attributed to Chandrasekhar (1931) should be the specific white
dwarf mass limit calculated for a polytrope. The insight that a relativistic
treatment of degeneracy leads to the existence of a white dwarf mass limit
first appeared in papers of W. Anderson (1929) and E.C. Stoner (1930) for a
uniform density star. Accordingly, Chandrasekhar (1931) cites Stoner (1930) and
points out that the polytrope white dwarf mass limit is less than Stoner's
uniform density white dwarf mass limit by about 20%.
