Brian Greene
American physicist
Brian Randolph Greene (born February 9, 1963) is an American physicist known for his research on string theory. He is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, director of its center for theoretical physics, and the chairman of the World Science Festival, which he co-founded in 2008. Greene co-discovered mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi–Yau manifolds. He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, and the conifold transition, a more severe transformation of space, showing that topology can smoothly change in string theory.
His books The Elegant Universe (1999), The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), The Hidden Reality (2011), and Until the End of Time (2020) were all top 10 New York Times bestsellers. Greene hosted two Emmy and Peabody Award Winning NOVA miniseries based on his books. He also appeared on The Big Bang Theory episode "The Herb Garden Germination", as well as in the films Frequency and The Last Mimzy. From 2015 to 2020, he served on the board of overseers of Harvard University, and is currently a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Early life and education
Greene was born in New York City of Jewish background. His father, Alan Greene, was a one-time vaudeville performer and high school dropout who later worked as a voice coach and composer.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brian Greene” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.