The cold dark matter universe.

This paper reviews one particular theory for the origin and evolution of structure in the universe, the so-called cold dark matter theory. It begins with a discussion of cosmological nucleosynthesis and inflation, which provide the basic premises of the theory by giving definite predictions for the material content, initial curvature, and fluctuation structure of the universe. This is followed by brief discussions of the possible nature of the dark matter, and of the theory of perturbation evolution. The rest of the paper concentrates on models for the formation of nonlinear structure from these initial conditions. Numerical simulations have been used to study many of these processes and the author summarizes the major successes and possible failures of the theory.