Up

for auction a RARE! "ΛCDM Model" Simon White Hand Signed 4X6 Card.

ES-289

Simon

David Manton White (born

30 September 1951), FRS, is a British astrophysicist. He was

one of directors at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics before

his retirement in late 2019. White studied Mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge in the

University of Cambridge (B.A. 1972) and Astronomy at

the University of Toronto (MSc 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 and the

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 (SHAO) (1999) and Beijing

(BAO) (2001). White lives in Munich with his wife, the astrophysicist Guinevere

Kauffmann, and their son Jonathan. White has worked primarily on the

formation of structure in the Universe. He is known for his contributions to

our understanding of galaxy formation and for his role in helping to establish

the viability of the current 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 they form by condensation

of gas at the centres of extended and hierarchically clustering dark matter

halos. In

later years White developed computer models which allowed the growth of

galaxies and galaxy clustering to be simulated directly in order to allow

quantitative comparison of theoretical models with astronomical observations.

His work with Marc Davis, George

Efstathiou and Carlos Frenk was

particularly influential in establishing that a universe dominated by Cold Dark

Matter could produce large-scale structure in the galaxy distribution which

closely resembles that observed. A more recent large project was the Millennium Simulation, carried out in

Garching in 2005 as part of the work of a large international collaboration,

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. Work by White has addressed issues of

stellar dynamics, of the detailed structure of 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. Papers include

those with Julio Navarro and Carlos Frenk on

the "universal" structure of dark matter halos.[7] The Navarro–Frenk–White profile is named

after them.White's more than 500 publications in the refereed professional

literature have been cited more than 193,000 times by other scientists (status

mid-2020 according to Google

Scholar).