Just a quickie this fine summer morning to pass on the news – for those of you who haven’t heard yet – that this year’s Gruber Prize for Cosmology has been awarded to Marc Davis (Berkeley, USA), George Efstathiou (Cambridge, UK), Carlos Frenk (Durham, UK) and Simon White (Garching, Germany). This prestigious award is given for their pioneering work on the Cold Dark Matter model of structure formation, which included some of the first large-scale N-body computer simulations. The “Gang of Four” produced a number of papers during the 1980s that established the idea that galaxies form by hierarchical clustering from small initial fluctuations in a matter distribution dominated by massive collisionless non-baryonic particles, the most famous of their papers being pretty universally referred to as DEFW.
In fact, if you’ll forgive me going on a trip down memory lane, that paper, published in 1985, was one of the first papers I read when I started my research degree the same year at Sussex. It was back in the days when everyone seemed to use a VAX for big computing jobs and the simulations presented in that paper involved a mere 323 = 32768 particles. You could probably run that kind of simulation on a mobile phone these days!
This early work on Cold Dark Matter wasn’t the final word, of course. Subsequent observational evidence for an accelerating Universe resulting in our standard cosmological model being modifiel to include an additional (large) component of dark energy in addition to dark matter. Nevertheless, the core ideas presented by DEFW established the basic foundations of structure formation upon which the current standard model is built.
Incidentally, you can read an interesting account of the discovery of the accelerating universe here; a cosmologist by the name of “George F. Stathew” plays a prominent role in that piece and it’s curious I’ve never heard of him before now.
Each of the four winners gets a share of the $500000 Gruber Prize, i.e. in “normalized” terms, they get $125000 each. Why is it so controversial to suggest dividing citation counts the same way? The DEFW paper has about 1500 citations according to ADS, so I think it’s quite reasonable to award the authors 370-odd each towards their respective h-indices. That’s still a pretty good result by any bibliometric standard!
The four also get a Gold Medal each to wear at parties, although by my previous logic they should have to share one between them. Perhaps George might consider donating his to Arsenal Football Club, as their trophy cabinet is looking rather empty these days?
None of the winners are Australian undergraduates, so this award probably won’t be considered newsworthy by the mass media. Believe it or not, however, the Gruber Prize is held in even higher regard by cosmologists than the Templeton Prize, so I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate them myself for their thoroughly well-deserved honour!
In the Dark 