Ralph H. Fowler

Sir Ralph Howard Fowler was a British mathematical physicist, born in Roydon, England in 1889. He studied mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, served in the Royal Marine Artillery in World War I where he worked on anti-aircraft ballistics, and returned to Trinity as College Lecturer in 1920. He worked on thermodynamics and statistical mechanics and brought a new approach to physical chemistry, wrote with Arthur Milne a seminal work on stellar spectra, temperatures and pressures, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1925. He became research supervisor to Paul Dirac and worked with him on the statistical mechanics of white dwarf stars.