Professor Brian Greene
Professor of Physics & Mathematics Columbia University, USA
Professor Brian Greene received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
He joined the physics faculty of Cornell University in 1990, was appointed to the position of full professor in 1995, and in 1996 he joined Columbia University as a professor of physics and of mathematics.
Professor Greene is widely recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in his field of superstring theory, including the co-discoveries of mirror symmetry and of topology change. He is also known to the public through his general-level lectures and writings.
His first book, The Elegant Universe was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, and has sold more than a million copies worldwide. His more recent books, The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Hidden Reality, were both New York Times bestsellers, and inspired the Washington Post to call him “the single best explainer of abstruse concepts in the world today”.
Professor Greene has had many media and television appearances and his three-part NOVA special based on The Elegant Universe was nominated for three Emmy Awards and won a Peabody Award. With Emmy-award winning journalist Tracy Day, he co-founded The World Science Festival, which was hailed by the New York Times as a “new cultural institution”. Currently, Professor Greene is co-director of Columbia’s Institute for Strings, Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (ISCAP) and is leading a research program applying superstring theory to cosmological questions.
