Simon David Manton White (born 30 September 1951), FRS, is a British-German astrophysicist. He was one of directors at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics before his retirement in late 2019. The Navarro–Frenk–White profile to describe dark matter is named after him.
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Life
White studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge (B.A. 1972) and Astronomy at the University of Toronto (M.Sc. 1974). In 1977, he obtained a doctorate in Astronomy under Donald Lynden-Bell entitled "The Clustering of Galaxies" at the University of Cambridge. After a few years at the University of California, Berkeley, the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona and
the University of Cambridge, he was appointed in 1994 as a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and as director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching. White has also been appointed research professor at the University of Arizona (1992), guest professor at the University of Durham (1995), honorary professor at LMU Munich (1994) and at the Astronomical Observatories of Shanghai (SHAO) (1999) and Beijing (BAO) (2001). White lives in Munich with his wife, the astrophysicist Guinevere Kauffmann. They have one son. In 2016, the day after the Brexit vote, White filed papers to obtain German citizenship.
Work
White has worked primarily on the formation of structure in the Universe. He is known for his contributions