Nicholas Kaiser

Nicholas Kaiser (15 September 1954 – 13 June 2023) was a British cosmologist. He was the son of Thomas Reeve Kaiser.

Life and career Kaiser was brought up in Sheffield and attended King Edward VII school from 1966 until 1973. He received his Bachelor's in physics at Leeds University in 1978, and his Part III in maths at University of Cambridge in 1979.

After postdoctoral positions at University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Sussex, and University of Cambridge, Kaiser was Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics Professor at the University of Toronto (1988–1997). In 1998 he moved to become Professor at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaiʻi. From 2017 to 2022 he was Professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Kaiser was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008.

Works Kaiser made major contributions to cosmology:

He made the first calculation of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (Kaiser 1983); Explained the higher bias of cluster galaxies relative to the matter field (Kaiser 1984); Computed the cosmic halo mass function using excursion set theory (Bond, Cole, Efstathiou & Kaiser 1991); First explained the departures of galaxy cluster scaling relations from simple self-similar models (Kaiser 1991); and Performed the first inversion of shear maps from weak gravitational lensing (Kaiser & Squires 1993).

Kaiser wrote articles on details of cosmological distance measures.

Kaiser was the initiator and Principal Investigator of the PanSTARRS imaging survey of most of the sky.

Awards and honors Kaiser won numerous awards and honors including:

Ontario Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Cosmology Program (1988) Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society (1989) Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2019)