Brian Greene

Greene was born in New York City on February 9, 1963.⁠[1]

He recalls growing up on 81st Street across from the Hayden Planetarium; his father, a composer and vocal coach, taught him the basics of mathematics. He attended Stuyvesant High School in the city.⁠[2]

He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and then, as a Rhodes Scholar, earned his doctorate at the University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

In 1990 he joined the physics faculty of Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry; in 1996 he moved to Columbia University, where he became a full professor in both the physics and mathematics departments.⁠[1]

That year he and M. R. Plesser published a paper in Nuclear Physics B describing a duality in the moduli space of string vacua in which two topologically distinct Calabi-Yau manifolds yield isomorphic conformal theories, forming a “mirror pair.”⁠[4]

His personal website lists the discovery of mirror symmetry and mild topology change (flop transitions) among his contributions, with research spanning string theory, mathematical physics and cosmology.⁠[5]

In April 1995 Greene, then at Cornell, released a preprint with David R. Morrison and Andrew StromingerAndrew StromingerAndrew Strominger is an American theoretical physicist and Gwill E. York Professor of Physics at Harvard University who works on quantum gravity, string theory and black holes; with collaborators he introduced Calabi–Yau compactifications of string theory, and with Cumrun Vafa he derived the Bekenstein–Hawking black hole entropy by counting microscopic states, and his honours include the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.Open the full entry proposing that black hole condensation can occur at conifold singularities of type II Calabi-Yau string vacua, smoothly connecting different Calabi-Yau spaces.⁠[6]

On February 1, 1999, Norton published his The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, which a review called possibly the clearest popular treatment of the subject to date.⁠[7]

The book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and has sold more than a million copies worldwide.⁠[3]

NOVA’s The Elegant Universe with Brian Greene, hosted by him and based on his book, won a 2003 Peabody Award; its producers included NOVA/WGBH and Channel 4.⁠[8]

The three-part NOVA special also won an Emmy Award.⁠[3]

In January 2003 the American Institute of Physics announced that he had won the Gemant Award, recognizing his accurate interpretation of frontier physics research for the public and for physicists in other fields.⁠[9]

The first World Science Festival ran in New York from May 28 to June 1, 2008, conceived by Greene and his wife, TV producer Tracy Day. He said the aim was “to shift science from the fringe of culture to the mainstream.”⁠[10]

On June 6, 2010, the World Science Festival presented Icarus at the Edge of Time at the NYU Skirball Center; based on Greene’s book, it featured music by Philip Glass and a narrative adapted by Greene and David Henry Hwang.⁠[11]

In 2011 Knopf published his The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (372 pages), which examines parallel-universe ideas including the many worlds of quantum physics, the brane worlds of string theory and the bubble universes of inflationary cosmology.⁠[12]

The first episode of the four-part PBS series The Fabric of the Cosmos, hosted by him, debuted on PBS apps on October 24, 2011, and the series aired nationally on Wednesdays from November 2 to 23.⁠[13]

The series was based on his best-selling book of the same name; on premiere night he hosted a screening and conversation at Columbia’s Miller Theatre.⁠[14]

On March 11, 2014, World Science U, the online course platform founded by Greene, launched with short videos and full classes featuring discussion forums and quizzes, all free at the time.⁠[15]

He said he did not want to use the internet as “a new delivery vehicle for old-style teaching.”⁠[16]

On May 22, 2019, the World Science Festival’s opening gala at Jazz at Lincoln Center premiered Light Falls, a theatrical work about Einstein’s general relativity, which aired on PBS on May 29.⁠[2]

His website says Light Falls was developed with 59 Productions for its projections and features a score by Jeff Beal.⁠[5]

On February 18, 2020, the ebook and audiobook editions of his Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe were released; the book runs from the big bang to the end of time, exploring the emergence of life and mind and how humans seek meaning.⁠[17]

A review noted that he explicitly acknowledges the influence of What Is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 collection of lectures.⁠[18]

From March 25, 2020, the World Science Festival released the video series Your Daily Equation with Brian Greene, offering brief, breezy discussions of pivotal equations along with live Q&As.⁠[19]

On October 20, 2021, he appeared as the guest of episode 232 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing entropy, consciousness, quantum gravity, string theory, time, free will, the big bang, extraterrestrial life, space exploration and the fear of death.⁠[20]

He is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, director of Columbia’s Center for Theoretical Physics, and co-founder and chairman of the World Science Festival.⁠[21]

He has made cameo appearances in the films Frequency and The Last Mimzy and appeared as himself in The Big Bang Theory.⁠[5]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.briangreene.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

X: Public account: https://x.com/bgreene (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

Columbia University: Official website: https://www.columbia.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

World Science Festival: Official website: https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

Cornell University: Official website: https://www.cornell.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]