Saul Perlmutter

Origins and early life

Saul Perlmutter was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, on 22 September 1959 and grew up in Mount Airy, Philadelphia, the son of Daniel Perlmutter, a professor of chemical engineering, and of Felice Davidson Perlmutter, a professor of social administration.

Work and career

In his Nobel autobiography he writes that his four grandparents all came to the United States as young adults from Eastern European Jewish towns and villages, and that his mother's father taught Yiddish literature and history. He and his two sisters went to Quaker schools in Germantown; he graduated in physics from Harvard in 1981 and took his doctorate at Berkeley in 1986 in Richard Muller's group, writing the software that let a robotic telescope find supernovae.

In 1988 he and Carl Pennypacker launched the Supernova Cosmology Project, which hunted distant type Ia supernovae, exploding stars bright and uniform enough to measure cosmic distances, and he became its leader in 1992. Analysing 42 such supernovae in 1997, his team found them fainter than expected, a sign that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, and announced it in January 1998, as a rival team led by Brian Schmidt reached the same conclusion.

The acceleration is thought to be driven by a dark energy that makes up about three quarters of the universe and whose nature is still an enigma.

Recognition

In 2011 he received one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae, the other half going to Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess. With them he had already shared the Shaw Prize in 2006, and in 2015 the three men and their teams shared the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. A professor at Berkeley, where he created a course on physics and music, he has sat since 2021 on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.