Simon White

Simon White (born September 30. 1951 in Ashford) is a British astrophysicist. He is one of four directors at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.

Life

White studied Mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge in the University of Cambridge (B.A. 1972) and Astronomy at the University of Toronto (M.Sc. 1974). In 1977 he obtained a doctorate in Astronomy under Donald Lynden-Bell entitled "The Clustering of Galaxies“ at the University of Cambridge. After a few years at the University of California, Berkeley, the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona andthe University of Cambridge he was appointed in 1994 as a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and as Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching. White is also Research Professor at the University of Arizona (1992), Guest Professor at the University of Durham (1995) Honorary Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich (1994) and at the Astronomical Observatories of Shanghai (1999) and Beijing (2001).

Work

White has worked primarily on the formation of structure in the Universe. He is known for his contributionsto our understanding of galaxy formation and for his role in helping to establish the viability of thecurrent standard model for the evolution of cosmic structure, the so-called ΛCDM model.

Already at the time of his doctoral work he studied the influence of Dark Matter on the growth of structure and in 1978 he and Martin Rees argued that the properties of galaxies can be understood if theyform by condensation of gas at the centres of extended dark matter halos.

In later years White developed computer models which allowed the growth of galaxies and galaxy clustering tobe simulated directly in order to allow quantitative comparison of theoretical models with astronomicalobservations. His work with Marc Davis, George Efstathiou and Carlos Frenk was particularlyinfluential in establishing that a universe dominated by Cold Dark Matter could produce large-scale structurein the galaxy distribution which closely resembles that observed. White's most recent large project hasbeen the Millennium Simulation, carried out in Garching as part of the work of a large internationalcollaboration, the Virgo Consortium. This simulation followed the formation of more than 2,000,000 galaxies throughout a cubic region more than 2 billion light-years on a side.

Further highly cited work by White has addressed issues of stellar dynamics, of the detailed structureof galaxies and their dark halos, of the processes controlling galaxy formation, of the structure and evolution of galaxy clusters, and of the statistics of galaxy clustering. Particularly influential papers werethose with Julio Navarro and Carlos Frenk on the "universal" structure of dark matter halos.

White is currently one of the most highly cited of all astrophysicists. His publications in the professionalrefereed literature have been cited more than 35,000 times by other scientists (Status in mid-2008 [http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~swhite] ).

Awards and honors

* Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society, 1986
* Fellow of the Royal Society, 1997
* Max-Planck Research Prize for International Cooperation, 2000
* Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics of the AIP/AAS, 2005
* Fellow of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, 2005
* Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2006
* Honorary Doctorate (D.Sc.) at the University of Durham, 2007
* Foreign Associate, US National Academy of Sciences, 2007
* Brouwer Award (Division on Dynamical Astronomy) of the American Astronomical Society, 2008

References

External links

* [http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~swhite/ Simon White site]