James Peebles

Biography

Born in 1935 in Winnipeg, Canada. He graduated from the University of Manitoba and then received his doctorate from Princeton University in 1962. His entire career was at Princeton, where he became a professor. He made fundamental contributions to the theory of galaxy formation, the analysis of cosmic microwave background fluctuations, and the understanding of the role of dark matter. He won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics 'for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology'.

Key discoveries

• Developed the theory of galaxy formation from primordial fluctuations
• predicted the cosmic microwave background radiation as a remnant of the hot Big Bang (jointly with Dicke and others)
• contributed to the understanding of nucleosynthesis in the early Universe
• pointed out the necessity of dark matter to explain structure
• pioneering work on the statistics of galaxy clusters.