Robert Kraft (astronomer)

Robert Paul Kraft (June 16, 1927 – May 26, 2015) was an American astronomer. He performed pioneering work on Cepheid variables, stellar rotation, novae, and the chemical evolution of the Milky Way. His name is also associated with the Kraft break: the abrupt change in the average rotation rate of main sequence stars around spectral type F8.

Career
Kraft served as director of the Lick Observatory (1981–1991), president of the American Astronomical Society (1974–1976), and president of the International Astronomical Union (1997–2000).

He received his B.S. at the University of Washington in 1947, M.S. in mathematics at the University of Washington in 1949, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He died in 2015.

Awards

 * Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy (1962)
 * Henry Norris Russell Lectureship (1995)
 * Bruce Medal (2005)
 * National Academy of Sciences

Named after him

 * Asteroid 3712 Kraft