William Alfred Fowler (9 August 1911 – 14 March 1995) was an American nuclear physicist and astrophysicist who made fundamental contributions to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, the processes by which chemical elements are formed inside stars. He shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar for this work. Fowler’s research, much of it in collaboration with Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, and Fred Hoyle (the B²FH paper, 1957), explained how elements heavier than hydrogen are synthesized through nuclear reactions in stars and during supernova explosions. He spent most of his career at the California Institute of Technology, where he was a professor of physics, and his work bridged nuclear physics and astrophysics, shaping the modern understanding of the chemical evolution of the universe.
