American physicist who, in the 1950s, did fundamental work on explaining how the various elements are synthesized inside stars and theoretically predicting what their present abundance should be, culminating in the famous "" Fowler, Burbridge, and Burbridge paper (1957). With his students in the 1960s, he also calculated the relative amounts of deuterium and lithium which should have been produced in the big bang. His results agreed very closely with what astronomers observed.

In 1983, he shared the Nobel prize in physics for his work (the other awardee was Chandrasekhar). Fowler has been described as "a grizzled and stocky extrovert from southern Ohio who liked to pretend that he was just a hard-drinking country boy when in reality he was a powerful and shrewd physicist" (Overbye 1991, p. 41).

Chandrasekhar

Additional biographies: Bruce Medalists, Bonn