George Efstathiou has been awarded the 2022 Gold Medal in Astronomy from the Royal Astronomical Society. The Medal is the Society's highest honour, with past winners including Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Arthur Eddington and Stephen Hawking, and recognises lifetime achievement in the field.
In bestowing the award, the Society commented:
"[Professor George Efstathiou] is amongst the most distinguished cosmologists of his generation, one of the architects of the standard model of cosmology, “Lambda cold dark matter” (LCDM). Prof. Efstathiou has made transformational contributions in computer simulations of the formation of structure in the universe, galaxy surveys and the analysis of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, faint background radiation lingering from the early stages of the Universe. He was one of the first to use computer simulations to calculate the non-linear evolution of the primordial perturbations, (density variations in the early universe) from which cosmic structure grows."
