Jeremiah Ostriker, famous American astronomer, professor, and senior research scientist, Jeremiah Paul Ostriker, died. He was Charles A. Young Professor Emeritus at Princeton and Columbia Universities. Ostriker also served as Princeton University Provost.
Jeremiah Ostriker Biography: His Life and Legal Legacy
Jeremiah Ostriker Background and education
A kid was born to Martin Ostriker, a clothing company owner, and Jeanne (Sumpf) Ostriker, a public school teacher, on New York City’s Upper West Side. He has three siblings. “I felt that I learned better on my own than through school,” Ostriker writes of teaching himself calculus and other difficult subjects after becoming interested in science early on. His undergraduate and doctoral degrees were from Harvard and Chicago, respectively.
Jeremiah Ostriker Career and education
He conducted postdoctoral studies at Cambridge University after earning his PhD from Chicago. Ostriker taught at Princeton from 1971 to 1995 and was provost from 1995 to 2001. The Cambridge Institute of Astronomy designated him Plumian Professor of Experimental Philosophy and Astronomy from 2001 to 2003. After returning to Princeton as Charles Young Professor of Astronomy, he became Charles A. Young Professor Emeritus. He became a Columbia University astronomy professor in 2012.
Ostriker established that dark matter, which is undetectable to the human eye, makes up most of the universe’s mass. He also studied black holes, galaxy evolution, cosmology, and the interstellar medium. Ostriker helped develop the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which publishes all its astronomical data online. This effort earned him the White House Champions of Change Award on June 20, 2013.
In addition to galaxy formation stability, Ostriker is known for the Ostriker-Peebles criterion.
Jeremiah Ostriker’s Published works
The NASA Astrophysics Data System reports that Ostriker’s works have been cited over 85,910 times as of April 2021. This includes:
Cosmology: “Precision?” “Not Just Yet: Unlocking the Invisible Universe, The Dark Heart. Princeton University (2013).
New light on dark matter, Scientific American 300, 1909–1914 (2003) The DOI is 10.1126/Health.1085976 for the “Science” paper.
A Probability Distribution Function for Universe Light: Hydrodynamic Model Results, Astrophysical journal article 597, page 1 from 2003.
Cosmological Mach Number with Galaxy Age and Overdensity
Physical Review Letters, 84, 5258-5260 (2000), examines enormous black holes and collisional dark matter origins.
The Hydrodynamics of Black Hole Accretion, Advanced Space Research 7, 951–960 (1998). Open-access: 10.1177/S0273-1177(98)00127-6
Jeremiah Ostriker Honor and praise
Ostriker has received various awards:
National Academy of Sciences membership in 1974
Admission to the 1975 American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Winner of 1972 AAS Helen B. Warner Prize in Astronomy
Da Vinci Lectures at AAS between 1980 and 1990s INSA-Vainu Bappu Memorial Award winning player
1994 American Philosophical Society Membership
International Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Arts membership (1999)
1999 Karl Schwarzschild Award
White House Medal of Science from President Clinton (2000)
2001 Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement
The 2004 Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal
Foreign Member of the Royal Society since 2007.
Bruce Award (2011)
2012 James Craig Watson Medal
The White House Transformation Advocate (2013)
Cosmology Excellence Award (2015)
His 2020 American Astronomical Society Legacy Fellow status.
Jeremiah Ostriker’s life
In 1958, Ostriker and his wife, poet and writer Alicia Ostriker (previously Suskin), had three children: Gabriel, Eve, and Rebecca. Eve became an astrophysics professor at Princeton University in 2012, Dad’s retirement year. Jeremiah and Alicia Ostriker lived in Princeton, NJ.
Renal disease killed Ostriker, aged 87, in Manhattan on April 6, 2025.
Honoring Jeremiah Ostriker
In moments like these, we feel the loss deeply. Jeremiah Ostriker left a lasting impact on many lives.
If you have any memories or thoughts to share, please feel free to leave a comment below. Let’s come together to remember and celebrate his life.
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