Matias Zaldarriaga

Last updated
Matias Zaldarriaga
Born
CitizenshipArgentine
Alma mater
Known for CMBFAST code [1]
Awards
Scientific career
Institutions
Thesis Fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background [3]  (1998)
Doctoral advisor Edmund Bertschinger
Website www.ias.edu/scholars/zaldarriaga

Matias Zaldarriaga is a theoretical physicist best known for his work on cosmology. He has made significant contributions toward understanding both astrophysical phenomena and fundamental physics, most notably through his research on modeling the early universe and analyzing statistical properties of cosmic microwave background data. Zaldarriaga grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Buenos Aires in 1994. He received his PhD in 1998 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Zaldarriaga was a faculty member at New York University and Harvard University, where he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. He is currently a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he has been a faculty member since 2009. [4]

Contents

Life

Born in Coghlan neighbourhood, Buenos Aires, at the present time he works in the Institute for Advanced Study located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. He is known especially for his work on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Together with Uros Seljak, he developed the CMBFAST code, the first computationally efficient method for computing the anisotropy of the CMB for an arbitrary set of cosmological parameters. In 2018, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Awards

In 2003, he was awarded the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society, and in 2005 he won the Gribov Medal of the European Physical Society. In 2006, he was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. [5] In 2020, he was jointly awarded the Buchalter Cosmology Prize. [6] Zaldarriaga was awarded the 2021 Gruber Prize in Cosmology jointly with Uroš Seljak and Marc Kamionkowski, who together "introduced numerous techniques for the study of the large-scale structure of the universe as well as the properties of its first instant of existence." [7]

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rashid Sunyaev</span> Russian astronomer (born 1943)

Rashid Alievich Sunyaev is a German, Soviet, and Russian astrophysicist of Tatar descent. He got his MS degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) in 1966. He became a professor at MIPT in 1974. Sunyaev was the head of the High Energy Astrophysics Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been chief scientist of the Academy's Space Research Institute since 1992. He has also been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany since 1996, and Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since 2010. In February 2022, he signed an open letter from Russian scientists and science journalists condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jim Peebles</span> Canadian-American astrophysicist and cosmologist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">South Pole Telescope</span> Telescope at the South Pole

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In physical cosmology, CMBFAST is a computer code, written by Uroš Seljak and Matias Zaldarriaga, for computing the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background. It was the first efficient program to do so, reducing the time taken to compute the anisotropy from several days to a few minutes by using a novel semi-analytic line-of-sight approach.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles L. Bennett</span> American astronomer

Charles L. Bennett is an American observational astrophysicist. He is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, the Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Gilman Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's highly successful Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP).

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Uroš Seljak is a Slovenian cosmologist and a professor of astronomy and physics at University of California, Berkeley. He is particularly well-known for his research in cosmology and approximate Bayesian statistical methods.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Licia Verde</span> Italian cosmologist and theoretical physicist (born 1971)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hiranya Peiris</span> British astrophysicist (born 1974)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oliver Zahn</span> German-American Scientist and Entrepreneur

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References

  1. "Overview of CMBFAST". NASA . Retrieved September 15, 2023.
  2. "Matias Zaldarriaga". MacArthur Foundation . Retrieved September 15, 2023.
  3. "Fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background". MIT . Retrieved September 15, 2023.
  4. "Matias Zaldarriaga". www.nasonline.org. National Academy of Sciences . Retrieved 2023-09-13.
  5. Felicia Lee (2006-09-19). "This Year's MacArthur Awards Cover Many Fields". New York Times .
  6. "Natural Sciences Scholars and Alumni Win 2021 AAS Prizes" . Retrieved 2022-02-02.
  7. "2021 Gruber Cosmology Prize". gruber.yale.edu. Retrieved 6 May 2021.