William Fowler

William Fowler (1911-1995), American physicist and astronomer, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who made major contributions to cosmology theory. Fowler obtained his doctorate in 1936 from the California Institute of Technology, where he later taught and conducted research on stellar processes. The work for which he is best known was developed in collaboration with the British astronomers Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge and published in 1957. It described the processes of nuclear synthesis of chemical elements within stars, and it has become a cornerstone of modern astrophysics. Fowler shared the 1983 Nobel Prize for physics with the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.