Ralph Allan (or Allen) Sampson FRS[1] FRSE LLD (25 June 1866 – 7 November 1939) was a British astronomer.
He was the fourth of five children[2] to James Sampson, a Cornish-born metallurgical chemist, and his wife, Sarah Anne Macdermott.
He did important research into the theory of the motions of Jupiter's four Galilean satellites, for which he won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1928.
At the fifth International Congress of Mathematicians held in 1912 in Cambridge, Sampson presented a paper entitled Some points in the theory of errors.
[6] He retired in 1937 aged 71 due to failing health, and subsequently moved to Bath.