Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is a U.S. astrophysicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and head of the International Supernova Cosmology Project at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

[4][5] His maternal grandfather, the Yiddish teacher Samuel Davidson (1903–1989), emigrated to Canada (and then with his wife Chaika Newman to New York) from the Bessarabian town of Floreşti in 1919.

Perlmutter heads the Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Since all Type Ia supernovae are believed to occur in essentially the same way, they form a standard candle whose intrinsic luminosity can be assumed to be approximately the same in all cases.

The two teams' reports were published within weeks of each other, and their conclusions were readily accepted by the scientific community due to corroborating theories.

[10] For this work Perlmutter was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared jointly with Riess and Schmidt.

[10] Perlmutter is also a lead investigator in the Supernova/Acceleration Probe project, which aims to build a satellite dedicated to finding and studying more supernovae in the distant universe.

He is also a participant in the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which aims to increase our understanding of recent global warming through improved analyses of climate data.

[12] Perlmutter, Schmidt, Riess and their teams shared the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with $3 million to be split among them.

[15] Reference to Saul Perlmutter was made on the CBS television comedy series The Big Bang Theory during the 2011 episode "The Speckerman Recurrence".

Later in the episode, Sheldon criticises the lecture and questions the decision to award Perlmutter a Nobel Prize.