Joseph Silk | |
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Born | London, England | 3 December 1942
Citizenship | UK United States[ citation needed ] |
Alma mater | Clare College, Cambridge Harvard University |
Awards | Royal Society Bakerian Medal (2007) Balzan Prize (2011) Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2019) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Cosmology |
Institutions | Institut d'astrophysique de Paris University of Oxford University of California, Berkeley Johns Hopkins University |
Doctoral students | Max Tegmark [1] |
Joseph Ivor Silk FRS (born 3 December 1942) is a British-American [ citation needed ] astrophysicist. He was the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1999 to September 2011.
He is an Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford [2] and a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected May 1999). He was awarded the 2011 Balzan Prize for his works on the early Universe. [3] Silk has given more than two hundred invited conference lectures, primarily on galaxy formation and cosmology.
He was educated at Tottenham County School (1954–1960) and went on to study Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (1960–1963). [4] He obtained his PhD in Astronomy from Harvard in 1968. Silk took up his first post at Berkeley in 1970, and the Chair in Astronomy in 1978. Following a career of nearly 30 years there, Silk returned to the UK in 1999 to take up the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford. He is currently Professor of Physics at the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Homewood Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University (since in 2010), and Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College from 2015 to 2019. [5]
The structure of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies is principally determined by two effects: acoustic oscillations and diffusion damping. The latter is also called collisionless or Silk damping after Joseph Silk.
Silk has over 900 publications, nearly 200 as first author, of which 3 have been cited over 1000 times, over 50 have been published in Nature and 12 in Science . [8]
In 2011, Silk delivered a talk, "The Creation of the Universe," at the first Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands. The talk was subsequently published in the book Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space. [9]
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John David Barrow was an English cosmologist, theoretical physicist, and mathematician. He served as Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College from 2008 to 2011. Barrow was also a writer of popular science and an amateur playwright.
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The position of Savilian Professor of Astronomy was established at the University of Oxford in 1619. It was founded by Sir Henry Savile, a mathematician and classical scholar who was Warden of Merton College, Oxford, and Provost of Eton College. He appointed John Bainbridge as the first professor, who took up his duties in 1620 or 1621.
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Andrew E. Lange was an astrophysicist and Goldberger Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Lange came to Caltech in 1993 and was most recently the chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy. Caltech's president Jean-Lou Chameau called him "a truly great physicist and astronomer who had made seminal discoveries in observational cosmology".
The position of Savilian Professor of Geometry was established at the University of Oxford in 1619. It was founded by Sir Henry Savile, a mathematician and classical scholar who was Warden of Merton College, Oxford, and Provost of Eton College, reacting to what has been described by one 20th-century mathematician as "the wretched state of mathematical studies in England" at that time. He appointed Henry Briggs as the first professor. Edward Titchmarsh said when applying that he was not prepared to lecture on geometry, and the requirement was removed from the duties of the post to enable his appointment, although the title of the chair was not changed. The two Savilian chairs have been linked with professorial fellowships at New College, Oxford, since the late 19th century. Before then, for over 175 years until the middle of the 19th century, the geometry professors had an official residence adjoining the college in New College Lane.
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