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Carl Vilhelm Ludwig Charlier (1 April 1862 – 4 November 1934) was a Swedish people astronomer. His parents were Emmerich Emanuel and Aurora Kristina (née Hollstein) Charlier.
He made extensive statistical studies of the stars in our galaxy and their positions and motions, and tried to develop a model of the galaxy based on this. He proposed the siriometer as a unit of stellar distance.
Charlier was also interested in pure statistics and played a role in the development of statistics in Swedish academia. Several of his pupils became statisticians, working at universities and in government and companies.
Related to his work on galactic structure, he also developed a cosmological theory based on the work of Johann Heinrich Lambert. In the resulting Lambert-Charlier Hierarchical Cosmology, increasingly large areas of space contain decreasing densities of matter, the principle being introduced to avoid the observational inconsistency that would otherwise emerge from Olbers's paradox.
Late in his career, he translated Isaac Newton's Principia into Swedish. He died in Lund, aged 72.
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