Jeremiah Paul Ostriker ( ; April 13, 1937 – April 6, 2025) was an American astrophysicist and a professor of astronomy at Columbia University and a Charles A. Young Professor Emeritus at Princeton, where he also served as a senior research scholar. Ostriker also served as a university administrator as Provost of Princeton University.

Early life and education

Ostriker was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Martin Ostriker, the proprietor of a clothing company, and Jeanne (Sumpf) Ostriker, a public school teacher. His research also focused on the interstellar medium, galaxy evolution, cosmology and black holes. On June 20, 2013 Ostriker was given the White House Champions of Change Award for his role in initiating the Sloan Digital Sky Survey project, which makes all of its astronomical data sets available publicly on the Internet.

Ostriker was also known for the Ostriker–Peebles criterion, relating to the stability of galactic formation.

Personal life and death

Ostriker married noted poet and essayist Alicia Ostriker (née Suskin) in 1958, and they had three children: Rebecca[https://www.discogs.com/artist/11411132-Rebecca-Ostriker], Eve, and Gabriel. Like her father, Eve became an astrophysics professor at Princeton University, in 2012, the same year as her father's retirement. Jeremiah and Alicia Ostriker were residents of Princeton, New Jersey.

Ostriker died of renal disease in Manhattan, on April 6, 2025, at the age of 87.

  • Heart of Darkness, Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe Princeton University Press (2013)
  • New Light on Dark Matter, Science, 300, pp 1909–1914 (2003)
  • The Probability Distribution Function of Light in the Universe: Results from Hydrodynamic Simulations, Astrophysical Journal 597, 1 (2003)
  • Cosmic Mach Number as a Function of Overdensity and Galaxy Age, Astrophysical Journal, 553, 513 (2001)
  • Collisional Dark Matter and the Origin of Massive Black Holes, Physical Review Letters, 84, 5258-5260 (2000).
  • Hydrodynamics of Accretion onto Black Holes, Adv. Space Res., 7, 951-960 (1998).

Awards and honors

Ostriker won numerous awards and honors including:

  • Membership of the National Academy of Sciences (1974)
  • Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975)
  • Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) (1972)
  • Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the AAS (1980)
  • INSA-Vainu Bappu Memorial Award (1993)
  • Membership of the American Philosophical Society (1994)
  • Foreign membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999)
  • Karl Schwarzschild Medal (1999)
  • National Medal of Science by U.S. president Bill Clinton (2000)
  • Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (2001)
  • Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (2004)
  • Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2007

References