The Mass of Quasars
  I review the current status of quasar black hole (BH) mass estimations.
Spectroscopic methods have been developed to estimate BH mass in broad line
quasars to an accuracy of ~0.5 dex. Despite their popularity, significant
issues and confusion remain regarding these mass estimators. I provide an
in-depth discussion on the merits and caveats of the single-epoch (SE) virial
BH mass estimators, and a detailed derivation of the statistical biases of
these SE mass estimates resulting from their errors. I show that error-induced
sample biases on the order of a factor of several are likely present in the SE
mass estimates for flux-limited, statistical quasar samples, and the
distribution of SE masses in finite luminosity bins can be narrower than the
nominal uncertainty of these mass estimates. I then discuss the latest
applications of SE virial masses in quasar studies, including the early growth
of supermassive black holes, quasar demography in the mass-luminosity plane,
and the evolution of the BH-host scaling relations, with specific emphases on
selection effects and sample biases in the SE masses. I conclude that there is
a pressing need to understand and deal with the errors in these BH mass
estimates, and to improve these BH weighing methods with substantially more and
better reverberation mapping data.
