16 October] 1880 – 26 March 1940) was a Russian-Estonian astrophysicist of Baltic German descent who studied the physical structure of the stars.

Wilhelm Anderson was born in Minsk (now in Belarus) into a Baltic German family.

[4] In 1934 he became a habilitation candidate at the university, and in 1936 he received an assistant professorship there, but early in 1939 he suffered a mental breakdown which left him unable to work.

[1] Like the majority of Baltic Germans, in January 1940 he was resettled to Germany,[5] where he died in the Sanatorium of Meseritz-Obrawalde, shortly thereafter.

[1] Anderson is probably best known for his work on the mass limit for a white dwarf (one of the final evolutionary states of a star),[6] extending Edmund Stoner's earlier work [7] by relativistic amplification (1929, Tartu),[8][9][1] which was in turn further improved by Stoner.