Brian Greene

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, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), 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.