Brian Greene

Dr. Brian Greene (born February 9, 1963) is a physicist and one of the world's foremost string theorists. As of 2003, he is a professor at Columbia University. Born in New York City, Greene was a child prodigy in mathematics. At the age of five, he could multiply 30-digit numbers. His skill in mathematics was so great that by the time he was twelve years old, he was being privately tutored in mathematics by a Columbia University professor because he had surpassed the high-school math level. He entered Harvard in 1980 to major in physics, and with his bachelor's degree, Greene went to Oxford University, in England, as a Rhodes Scholar.

Facts

• Brian Greene graduated in 1980 from Stuyvesant High School in New York City.
• He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and went on to receive his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
• He lives in Dublin, Ireland.
• He joined the physics faculty of Cornell University in 1990
• Was appointed to a full professorship in 1995
• In 1996 he joined Columbia University where he is professor of physics and mathematics.
• He has lectured at both a general and a technical level in more than twenty-five countries and is widely regarded for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory.
• He is the author of The Elegant Universe, a popularization of super string and M-theory, and winner of The Aventis Prizes for Science Books in 2000.
• His second book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, is about space, time, and the texture of reality.
• In his research, Professor Greene has focused on the extra dimensions required by string theory, and sought to understand their physical, mathematical, and observational consequences.
• Professor Greene has had many media appearances including Charlie Rose, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, The Century with Peter Jennings, CNN, TIME, Nightline in Primetime, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, a cameo appearance in New Line Cinema's Frequency, and he recently hosted a three-part Nova special based on his book.
• 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.
• He is a vegetarian.
• He is one of very few people to have both an Erdős number, connecting him to Paul Erdős by authorship of a mathematics paper, and a Bacon number, connecting him to Kevin Bacon because he appeared in a film, Frequency (2000).