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.

Important contributions to physics

• Brian Greene is one of the fathers of mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi-Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds).
• He (and David Morrison and Paul Aspinwall) also understood the flop transition, a mild form of topology change.
• Together with David Morrison and Andrew Strominger, he showed that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.
• He currently studies string cosmology, especially the imprints of trans-Planckian physics on the cosmic microwave background, and brane-gas cosmologies that could explain why the space around us has three large dimensions.
• Expanded on the suggestion of a black hole electron, namely that the electron may be a black hole.