Sir Fred Hoyle (West Yorkshire, England, June 24, 1915 – Dorset, England, August 20, 2001) was an English astronomer who formulated the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis.

He was educated at Emmanuel College and St. John’s College, Cambridge, and spent six years during World War II with the British Admiralty, working on radar development. In 1945 he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in mathematics.

He is known for his popular science works, including "The Nature of the Universe" (1951), and "Astronomy and Cosmology" (1975). He also wrote novels, plays, and short stories.

In 1920, Arthur Eddington, on the basis of the precise measurements of atoms by F.W. Aston, was the first to suggest that stars obtained their energy from nuclear fusion of hydrogen to form helium.

This work concerned the energy generation capable of keeping stars hot, but did not address the creation of heavier nuclei, however. That theory was begun by Fred Hoyle in 1946 with his argument that a collection of very hot nuclei would assemble into iron. He followed that in 1954 with a large paper describing how advanced fusion stages within stars would synthesize elements between carbon and iron in mass. This is the dominant work in stellar nucleosynthesis.

It provided the roadmap to how the most abundant elements on earth had been synthesized from initial hydrogen and helium, making clear how those abundant elements increased their galactic abundances as the galaxy aged.

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