This is a book review of Strong Gravitational Lensing in the Era of Big Data by Hannah_Stacey. Strong Gravitational Lensing in the Era of Big Data, IAU Symposium 381, edited by Hannah Stacey, Alessandro Sonnenfeld & Claudio Grillo (Cambridge University Press), 2013. Pp. 183, 25.5 × 18 cm. Price £120/$155 (hardbound, ISBN 978 1 009 39899 2).
Many of my own papers are on strong gravitational lensing and I considered attending the conference, so it seems appropriate for me to review the proceedings, in part to update myself on the field, which has already benefitted, and will continue to benefit, from recent and planned improvements in observations, hence the "big data in the title. As noted in the first contribution in these proceedings, it is expected that instruments such as Euclid and the Roman Space Telescope will discover about 100,000 such systems. Not only is that a quantitative change, but a qualitative one as well: no one person can have even a passing familiarity with all systems, and "manual" modelling will have to give way to automated procedures. The book covers cosmology, dark matter, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and high-redshift sources. More-specific topics are machine learning, measuring the Hubble constant, and substructure in galaxies. The book does provide a useful short introduction to several currently hot topics. My goal of getting a feel for current research was fulfilled, though I wonder what I am missing, since, comparing the book with the online programme, fewer than half of the contributions are included in the proceedings. Unfortunately, instead of "edited", "collated" might be more appropriate, as apparently little actual editing was involved. Despite my qualms, for me it was an interesting read, and the relatively short length might even be an advantage if the goal is to get a taste of current research in the field.
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