Jerome Kristian

Jerome A. "Jerry" Kristian (born June 5, 1934 in Milwaukee, d. June 22, 1996 in Ventura County, California) was a theoretical and observational cosmologist, and the first to provide observational evidence of quasar host galaxies.

Kristian began his career in theoretical cosmology but transitioned into observation while working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in the 1960s and 1970s. He helped to pioneer the observational study of pulsars and quasars and participated in the development of the Hubble Space Telescope. He was the first to provide observational support for the now widely accepted theory that quasars are supermassive black holes at the center of distant galaxies.

At the undergraduate level, Kristian attended Shimer College, a small Great Books college then located in Mount Carroll, Illinois. Because of the school's early entrance program, which began in 1950, he was able to enter college before completing high school. He served as editor-in-chief of the school yearbook and graduated with an AB degree in 1953, while he was still 19. After graduating, he attended the University of Texas for specialized study in physics.

On August 27, 1955, Kristian married Mary Jeanes, a fellow Shimer student who had also moved to the University of Texas, in her case to pursue advanced study in Spanish.

For his graduate studies, starting in the fall of 1955, Kristian attended the University of Chicago, receiving his MS in 1956 and his Ph.D. in 1962. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Hydromagnetic Equilibrium of a Fluid Sphere" and supervised by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, was split into three separate papers and published in The Astrophysical Journal in 1963 and 1964.

After graduation, Kristian returned to the University of Texas as an instructor, working there from 1962 to 1964. In 1963, Kristian and his former teacherRainer K. Sachs coauthored a paper on Observations in Cosmology. In a special editorial note accompanying a reprint of the paper in 2010, George Ellis called it "one of the least appreciated fundamental papers in theoretical cosmology." The paper "carries out the project of showing how to determine the spacetime structure directly from astronomical observations in the generic General Relativity case, i.e without assuming any preconceived geometry for the universe, using a power series in distance from the origin of observation." 1963 also saw the publication of a key work by Boris Trakhtenbrot, Algorithms and Automatic Computing Machines, which Kristian had cotranslated with James McCawley and Samuel Schmitt.

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