Robert Paul Kraft (June 16, 1927 – May 26, 2015) was an American astronomer.^[1] 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.^[2]

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).^[3]

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.^[4] He died in 2015.^[5]