Brian Greene

Brian Randolph Greene is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996 and chairman of the World Science Festival since cofounding it in 2008. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different CalabiYau manifolds . He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.

Greene was born in New York City. His father, Alan Greene, was a onetime vaudeville performer and high school dropout who later worked as a voice coach and composer. He stated in an interview with Lawrence Krauss that he is of Jewish heritage. After attending Stuyvesant High School, Greene entered Harvard in 1980 to concentrate on physics. After completing his bachelors degree, Greene earned his doctorate from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, graduating in 1987. While at Oxford, Greene also studied piano with the concert pianist Jack Gibbons.

Source: Wikipedia