The formation and evolution of the galaxy population

Recent observations of the high-redshift universe have characterized
the initial conditions for nonlinear structure formation over the full
range of scales responsible for dwarf and giant galaxies, galaxy
clusters and the large-scale cosmic web. At the same time, wide-field
spectroscopic and photometric surveys have measured the abundance and
clustering of low-redshift galaxies as a function of mass, size,
morphology, kinematic structure, gas content, metallicity, star
formation rate and nuclear activity, while deep surveys have explored
the evolution of several of these distributions to z>3.  Galaxy
population simulations aim to interpret these observations within the
LCDM structure formation paradigm, thereby constraining the complex,
diverse and heavily interconnected astrophysics of galaxy formation. I
will show that recent simulations are broadly consistent with the
galaxy abundances and clustering seen in both wide-field and deep
surveys, Such simulations provide predictions for topics as different
as galaxy-galaxy lensing, the triggering and duty cycles of AGN, and
the evolution of Tully-Fisher, mass-size and mass-metallicity
relations. They show galaxy assembly histories to be strongly
constrained by the structure formation paradigm, giving insight into
issues such as internally versus externally driven evolution, inflow
versus winds, major versus minor mergers, in situ versus ex situ star
formation, and disks versus bulges. In addition, simulations can now
be adapted to represent any chosen LCDM-like cosmology, allowing a
first assessment of whether galaxy formation uncertainties will limit
our ability to do precision cosmology with galaxy surveys.