Saul Perlmutter

Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is an American astrophysicist who is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and is head of the International Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Perlmutter shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Since 2021, he has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

Education Saul Perlmutter was born to Felice (Feige) D. Perlmutter (née Davidson), now professor emerita of the Temple University School of Social Administration, and Daniel D. Perlmutter, now professor emeritus of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. His maternal grandfather, the Yiddish teacher Samuel Davidson (1903–1989), emigrated from the Bessarabian town of Floreşti to Canada in 1919 and then with his wife Chaika Newman to New York.

Perlmutter spent his childhood in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. He went to Quaker schools in nearby Germantown; first Greene Street Friends School for the elementary grades, followed by Germantown Friends School for grades seven through twelve. He graduated with an AB in physics from Harvard magna cum laude in 1981 and received his PhD in physics from Berkeley in 1986. Perlmutter's PhD thesis, entitled "An Astrometric Search for a Stellar Companion to the Sun" and supervised by Richard A. Muller, described the development and use of an automated telescope to search for Nemesis candidates. Perlmutter attributes the idea for an automated supernova search to Luis Alvarez, a 1968 Nobel laureate, who shared his idea with Perlmutter's research adviser. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by other lines of evidence. These findings reinvigorated research into the nature of the universe, and especially into the role of dark energy. The same year, Perlmutter won the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize.

Perlmutter and his team shared the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize (a $500,000 award) with Schmidt and the High-Z Team for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe. In 2010, Perlmutter was named a Miller Senior Fellow of the Miller Institute at the University of California Berkeley. In 2011, Perlmutter and Riess were named co-recipients of the Albert Einstein Medal.

Perlmutter shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Riess and Schmidt.

Perlmutter, Schmidt, Riess, and their teams shared the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with $3 million to be split among them.

A United States Department of Energy 2020 supercomputer is named Perlmutter in his honor.

Family Perlmutter is married to Laura Nelson, an anthropologist at University of California, Berkeley, and they have one daughter, Noa. Perlmutter has two sisters: Shira Perlmutter (b. 1956), an attorney, law professor, and the fourteenth Register of Copyrights, and Tova Perlmutter (b. 1967), a nonprofit executive.

Popular culture

Reference to Saul Perlmutter was made on the CBS television comedy series The Big Bang Theory during the 2011 episodes "The Speckerman Recurrence" and "The Rhinitis Revelation". In these episodes, the lead character Sheldon Cooper, who aspires to win a Nobel Prize himself, jealously berates Perlmutter and questions the decision to award Perlmutter a Nobel Prize.

Technical reports and conference/event proceedings Perlmutter, S., et al. "Progress Report on the Berkeley/Anglo-Australian Observatory High-redshift Supernova Search", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, (November 1990). Perlmutter, S., et al. "Discovery of the Most Distant Supernovae and the Quest for {Omega}", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, (May 1994). Perlmutter, S., et al. "Discovery of a Supernova Explosion at Half the Age of the Universe and its Cosmological Implications", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, (December 16, 1997). Perlmutter, S., et al. "The Distant Type Ia Supernova Rate", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, (May 28, 2002). Perlmutter, S., et al. "The Supernova Legacy Survey: Measurement of Omega_M, Omega_Lambda, and w from the First Year Data Set", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, (October 14, 2005). Perlmutter, S. "Supernovae, Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe: How DOE Helped to Win (yet another) Nobel Prize", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, (January 13, 2012).