William H. Press

William H. Press (1980)

William Henry Press (born May 23, 1948 in New York City ) is an American astrophysicist , computer scientist and biologist .

biography

Press earned his doctorate in physics in 1972 from the California Institute of Technology ( Applications of black-hole perturbation techniques ). After a period as an assistant professor at Princeton University , he was professor of physics and astronomy at Harvard University from 1976 to 1998 . From 1998 to 2004 he was Associate Director of Science and Technology at Los Alamos National Laboratory and is currently Professor of Computer Science and Biology at the University of Texas at Austin .

Press began his career as a theoretical astrophysicist with work on cosmology . He is the first author of the widespread reference book Numerical Recipes on methods of numerical mathematics. Later he turned to science management and biological issues, currently he mainly works with statistical methods on bioinformatics and genetics .

He was involved in the supernova removal project by Adam Riess and Robert Kirshner and in the 1970s with Saul Teukolsky on the study of the dynamic stability of rotating black holes. He is known for the Press-Schechter formalism (1974, with Paul L. Schechter ), which represents the mass distribution of objects formed by gravitational collapse from initial fluctuations in the mass density in a certain volume. According to this, the distribution for small masses follows a power law and has an exponential cutoff for large masses with a limit mass that is time-dependent. The number of objects with masses between and is according to the model: ${\ displaystyle N (M)}$ ${\ displaystyle M}$ ${\ displaystyle m + dM}$

{\ displaystyle N (M) dM = {\ frac {1} {\ sqrt {\ pi}}} \ left (1 + {\ frac {n} {3}} \ right) {\ frac {\ bar {\ rho}} {M ^ {2}}} \ left ({\ frac {M} {M ^ {*}}} \ right) ^ {\ left (3 + n \ right) / 6} \ exp \ left ( - \ left ({\ frac {M} {M ^ {*}}} \ right) ^ {\ left (3 + n \ right) / 3} \ right) dM}

is the mean matter density (from baryonic and dark matter) , the power of the primordial fluctuations of the spectral power density in the early universe and the critical mass above which the objects are formed by gravitational attraction. The model explains the spatial density distribution of luminosity previously observed by Schechter, for example of stars in clusters and galaxies in galaxy clusters. ${\ displaystyle {\ bar {\ rho}}}$ ${\ displaystyle n}$ ${\ displaystyle P (k) \ propto k ^ {n}}$ ${\ displaystyle M ^ {*}}$

With Freeman Dyson he dealt with strategies in the prisoner's dilemma .

Honors

1974 Sloan Research Fellow
1981 Helen B. Warner Prize
1989 Fellow of the American Physical Society
1993 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1994 member of the National Academy of Sciences
2013 President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Fonts

with Alan Lightman , Saul Teukolsky : Problem book in relativity and gravitation. Princeton University Press, 1975.
with Teukolsky, William Vetterling, Brian Flannery: Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing. Cambridge University Press, 2007 (3rd edition).
with Paul Schechter: Formation of galaxies and clusters of galaxies by selfsimilar gravitational condensation, Astrophys. J., Volume 187, 1974, pp. 425-438

Web links

Commons : William H. Press - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Site of William Press (English)

Individual evidence

^ Press, Dyson: Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma contains strategies that dominate any evolutionary opponent, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, Volume 109, 2012, pp. 10409-10413

personal data
SURNAME	Press, William H.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Press, William Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American astrophysicist, computer scientist, and biologist
DATE OF BIRTH	May 23, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH	New York City

[1] Press, Dyson: Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma contains strategies that dominate any evolutionary opponent, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, Volume 109, 2012, pp. 10409-10413