Alexander Szalay

Alexander Szalay

Alexander Sandor Szalay , also Alex Szalay, (born June 17, 1949 in Debrecen ) is a Hungarian-American astrophysicist, computer scientist and cosmologist.

Szalay studied physics at the Lajos Kossuth University in Debrecen and the Loránd Eötvös University in Budapest , where he received his diploma in theoretical physics in 1972 and his doctorate in astrophysics in 1975. He then became a professor at Lorand Eötvös University with a full professorship from 1987 (which he remained when he took up his professorship in the USA). In 1980/81 he was a visiting scientist at the University of California, Berkeley , and 1981/82 at the University of Chicago and from 1984 to 1986 at Fermilab . In 1989 he became a professor at Johns Hopkins University . There he is Alumni Centennial Professor of Astronomy, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and also Professor in the Department of Computer Science. Szalay is the director of the Institute of Data Intensive Science (IDIES).

He is concerned with the statistical spatial distribution of galaxies and the formation of galaxies, especially with regard to the influence of different types of dark matter (warm, cold, hot, the characterization of which he introduced).

He is the architect of the scientific archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and developed data mining techniques for it with Jim Gray of Microsoft. Later he was significantly involved in the standardization of large astronomy databases (Virtual Observatory). With Simon White and others, he built a database for the Millennium Cosmological Simulation and he built a similar database for the Silver River Cosmology Simulation in Oak Ridge. Szalay was also active outside of astronomy in the development of data-intensive computer architectures. He also worked with Gordon Bell . He was involved in building a sensor network to measure environmental data in South America (with 200,000 sensors) and in building a database for turbulence simulation.

In 2015 he received the Sidney Fernbach Award , in 2007 the Jim Gray Award from Microsoft and in 2004 a Humboldt Research Award . Szalay is a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1990) and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003). He is an honorary doctorate from Lorand Eötvös University (2008).

Web links

• Homepage at Johns Hopkins

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter S. (PDF; 1.4 MB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Accessed December 1, 2018 .