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William Alfred Fowler
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- There is another William Fowler who was a Scottish poet and uncle of William Drummond of Hawthornden
William Alfred "Willie" 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 graduated from The Ohio State University and went on to receive 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
Eddington Medal in
1978, 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 (shared with
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar). He died in
Pasadena,
California.