Arthur Stanley Eddington was an English astronomer who was educated at Owens College, Manchester, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was Plumian professor of astronomy from 1913 to 1944. He never married, was socially rather diffident, and lived the quiet life of a Cambridge academic. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1914 and was knighted in 1930.

Eddington was one of the most brilliant theoreticians of his day, possessing an outstanding ability to survey complex and highly ramified subjects as wholes. His report to the Physical Society (1918) on the general theory of relativity, expanded into The Mathematical Theory of Relativity (London, 1923), contained important original contributions to the theory. Eddington's discovery of the mass-luminosity relation in stars and his explanation of white dwarf stars, which made possible the modern theory of stellar evolution, were published in The Internal Constitution of the Stars (London...