Nick Kaiser

Nicholas Kaiser was a British cosmologist. He is 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. He obtained his PhD in astronomy, also at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Martin Rees.
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. 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.
Kaiser died of heart failure on 13 June 2023, at the age of 68.

Kaiser made major contributions to cosmology:

He made the first calculation of the polarization of the cosmic microwave background ;
Explained the higher bias of cluster galaxies relative to the matter field ;
Made a detailed calculation of the statistics of density peaks in the primordial Universe ;
Introduced the mathematics of redshift-space distortions ;
Computed the cosmic halo mass function using excursion set theory ;
First explained the departures of galaxy cluster scaling relations from simple self-similar models ; and
Performed the first inversion of shear maps from weak gravitational lensing.

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.

Kaiser won numerous awards and honors including: