William Alfred Fowler
- There is another William Fowler who was a Scottish poet and uncle of William Drummond of Hawthornden
William Alfred "Willy" Fowler (
August 9,
1911 –
March 14,
1995) was an
American astrophysicist. He should not be confused with the British astronomer
Alfred Fowler.
Fowler was born in
Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. He received a Ph.D. in
nuclear physics at the
California Institute of Technology. His seminal paper
Synthesis of the Elements in Stars (
Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 29, Issue 4, pp. 547–650), coauthored with
E. Margaret Burbidge,
Geoffrey Burbidge, and
Fred Hoyle, was published in
1957. The paper explained how the abundances of essentially all but the lightest chemical elements could be explained by the process of
nucleosynthesis in stars.
Fowler won the
Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the
American Astronomical Society in
1963, the
Bruce Medal in
1979, and the
Nobel Prize for Physics in
1983 for his theoretical and experimental studies of the nuclear reactions of importance in the formation of the chemical elements in the universe. He died in
Pasadena,
California.
External links
\n* Nobel Prize page \n*
Bruce Medal page
Obituaries
\n* BAAS 27 (1995) 1475
Fowler, William Alfred\nFowler, William Alfred