Simon White

Simon David Manton White ( born September 30, 1951 in Ashford / Kent ) is a British astrophysicist and Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics.

Life

White studied at Jesus College at Cambridge University, Mathematics ( BA 1972) and astronomy at the University of Toronto (M.Sc. 1974), 1977, he received his doctorate at Donald Lynden - Bell at the University of Cambridge with a theme for the large-scale distribution of galaxies in the universe. After several years at the University of California, Berkeley and the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona in 1994, he was appointed as Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching. White is since 1992 a research professor at the University of Arizona, since 1994 Visiting Professor at the University of Durham, since 1995 honorary professor at the Ludwig- Maximilians- University in Munich, since 1999 Honorary Professor at the Astronomical Observatory in Shanghai and since 2001 honorary professor at the Astronomical Observatory in Beijing.

White has lived since 1994 with his wife, the astrophysicist Guinevere Kauffmann, and her son in Munich.

Work

White is mainly concerned with the structure formation in the universe, his work provided a significant contribution to the development of the current standard model of the universe, the "model of cold dark matter with a cosmological constant" ( ΛCDM ). Already in his PhD, he examined the effects of dark matter on structure formation, and in 1978 he proposed together with Martin Rees, a model that took into account the significant influence of dark matter on the formation of galaxies for the first time.

Later, he developed computer models for the numerical calculation, which allowed a direct comparison with astronomical observations - his most recent project was the Millennium simulation, which followed the emergence of more than 2 million galaxies in a cube-shaped room area of more than 2 billion light years across. Other often-cited works Whites comprise the fields of stellar, the detailed structure of nearby galaxies, the formation of galaxies, the structure of their dark halos, gravitational lensing, the X-ray observations of galaxy clusters as well as the study of the cosmic microwave background.

White is currently regarded as one of the most cited and most important astrophysicist, his over 300 publications reach an h- index of 120 (as of early 2012 )

Honors and Awards

White is the Royal Society since 2005 Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, since 2007 Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences since 2009 and a Fellow of the Academia Europaea since 1997 Fellow.