The Elegant Universe
Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

Not many author bios begin with the author also being an American theoretical physicist, mathematician, and string theorist, but such is the bio for Brian Randolph Greene. He is a full professor in Physics at Columbia University where he has worked on "mirror symmetry" and described the "flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology theory can change at the conifold point".

Greene was born in New York City in 1963 to a Jewish family. His father was a high school drop-out, performed in vaudeville, then became a voice
coach and composer. Greene earned his doctorate at Magdalen College, Oxford University in 1987. He also studied piano while there.

The public knows him through his books: The Elegant Universe, Icarus at the Edge of Time, The Fabric of the Cosmos and The Hidden Reality. For fun, he has appeared on The Big Bang Theory, and has been in the films Frequency and The Last Mimzy. He was also the voice reader of the U.S. version of the preschool television series, Maisy.

Currently, Greene is co-director of Columbia's Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics. He joins fellow investigators on a project entitled "Arrow of Time in the Quantum Universe", through a FQXi large grant award.