William H. Press

The son of geophysicist Frank Press, and a schoolteacher mother and administrator who "loved teaching science to kids,{{Cite web |last=Goodman |first=Daniel |date=2019 |title=Find Your Path: Unconventional Lessons from 36 Leading Scientists and Engineers |url=https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537544/find-your-path/ |access-date=2025-03-19 |website=MIT Press |pages=221-28 |language=en-US}}{{cite news |title=Frank Press, White House Science Adviser, Is Dead at 95 |work=The New York Times |date=February 2020 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/01/science/frank-press-dead.html |access-date=11 April 2022 |last1=Genzlinger |first1=Neil }} Press attended public schools in Pasadena, California, graduating from Pasadena High School in 1965.

Press identified his early educational experience as having specifically benefited from the boons of the post WWII educational drive and the sexism of that same era, when "women were limited in their career choices, and many smart women became schoolteachers," and WWII veterans, "who had gone to college on the GI Bill of Rights ... saw public-school teaching as an upwardly mobile profession."

His undergraduate education was at Harvard, where he received an A.B. in physics in 1969. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Caltech in 1972 as a student of Kip Thorne.{{Cite web |title=William H. Press Home Page |url=https://numrec.com/whp/ |access-date=2023-12-07 |website=numrec.com}}

Press was briefly an assistant professor at Caltech, then was an assistant professor at Princeton University (1974–1976) before returning to Harvard as a professor in 1976. At the age of 28, he was the university's then-youngest tenured faculty member (a distinction earlier held by Alan Dershowitz and later by Lawrence Summers and—at age 26—Noam Elkies).Ravi Vakil, "The Youngest Tenured Professor in Harvard History", Math

Horizons, September 1998, at http://mathdl.maa.org/images/upload_library/22/Evans/september_1998_8.pdf

Press was for more than 20 years a professor of astronomy and physics at Harvard University, and a member of the Center for Astrophysics {{!}} Harvard & Smithsonian. He was department chair in Astronomy in 1982–1985. In 1998, Press left Harvard to become deputy laboratory director at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), serving under Directors John C. Browne and George Peter Nanos.[http://www.lanl.gov/DLDSTP/vita_bio.html Summary Biography Information on William H. Press, February 2007, Los Alamos National Laboratory] He oversaw LANL's participation in the Joint Genome Institute and in the construction of the Spallation Neutron Source. Press moved to the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 and, changing his area of research, became the Warren J. and Viola M. Raymer Professor, jointly in the computer science and integrative biology departments.

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In the field of general relativity, Press is best known for his work with Saul Teukolsky, establishing the dynamic stability of rotating black holes.Thorne, K.S. (1994) Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy (Norton, {{ISBN|978-0-393-03505-6}}), p. 535 In astrophysics, Press is best known for his discovery, with Paul Schechter, of the Press–Schechter formalism, which predicts the distribution of masses of galaxies in the Universe;{{Citation | last1 = Press | first1 = W. H. | last2 = Schechter | first2 = P. | title = Formation of Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies by Self-Similar Gravitational Condensation | year = 1974 | journal = Astrophysical Journal | volume = 187 | pages = 425| bibcode = 1974ApJ...187..425P | doi=10.1086/152650 |bibcode-access=free |doi-access=free |url=https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1974ApJ...187..425P |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220622054230/https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1974ApJ...187..425P |archive-date= Jun 22, 2022 }} and for his work with Adam Riess and Robert Kirshner on the calibration of distant supernovas as "standard candles". This latter work enabledRiess, A.G. (2006) "[http://www.stsci.edu/~ariess/documents/Shaw%20Prize%20Lecture_web.pdf My Path to the Accelerating Universe]", Shaw Prize Lecture.{{cite web| url=https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2011/riess-lecture.html|title=Nobel Lecture: Supernovae Reveal an Accelerating Universe|year=2011|access-date=November 16, 2016}} the discovery of the accelerating universe by Riess, Brian Schmidt, and Saul Perlmutter, for which they received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Notably, with the 2017 Nobel award to Kip Thorne, Press joined the list of hapless individuals whose student and doctoral advisor have both won Nobels, but they haven't, a list that comprises Alfred Sturtevant, Gilbert N. Lewis, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Charles Lauritsen, E.B. Wilson, Richard A. Muller, Sam Treiman, Sidney Coleman and a few others.

With Freeman Dyson, Press discovered and named the zero-determinant strategies for the Prisoner's Dilemma and other games.{{Citation | last1 = Press | first1 = W. H. | last2 = Dyson | first2 = F. J. | title = Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma contains strategies that dominate any evolutionary opponent | year = 2012 | journal = PNAS | volume = 109 | issue = 26 | pages = 10409–10413| doi=10.1073/pnas.1206569109 | pmid=22615375 | pmc=3387070|bibcode = 2012PNAS..10910409P | doi-access = free }}

Press is a co-author of the successful textbook Numerical Recipes (three editions, as of 2019 more than 400,000 copies in print) on scientific computing.

{{Reflist|2}}

• [http://numerical.recipes/whp/ Website at the University of Texas at Austin]
• [http://numerical.recipes/whp/vita_san.pdf Curriculum Vitae]
• [https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=yi6DR64AAAAJ Google Scholar Profile: William H. Press]
• Scientific autobiography [http://morethancurious.com More Than Curious: A Science Memoir], published 2023.

{{Presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science}}

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Category:American relativity theorists

Category:1948 births

Category:Living people

Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences

Category:Members of JASON (advisory group)

Category:Harvard University alumni

Category:Los Alamos National Laboratory personnel

Category:20th-century American physicists

Category:21st-century American scientists

Category:California Institute of Technology alumni

Category:Pasadena High School (California) alumni

Category:Fellows of the American Physical Society

Category:American textbook writers

Category:Presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science