Who

Greene is a media-friendly Columbia physics professor and a pop-science rock star in the mold of Stephen Hawking and Stephen Jay Gould.

Backstory

The son of a former vaudeville performer, Greene was raised on the Upper West Side where he proved himself to be quite the child prodigy: At 5, he was multiplying 30-digit numbers; by the time he'd reached middle school, he was taking math classes at Columbia. After graduating from Stuyvesant, Greene went to Harvard, then on to graduate work at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (alongside then-friend George Stephanopoulos) in the mid-1980s. He became a professor of physics at Cornell in 1990, earning tenure at the relatively young age of 32. He jumped to Columbia in 1996 and currently heads up the university's Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics.

Of note

Greene has a reputation as one of the champions of string theory, a field of physics that holds that the universe is constructed out of really, really tiny one-dimensional loops. But it's the friendly face he puts on complicated scientific topics—and his ability to discuss the heady issues in public and on camera (a skill most un-telegenic physicists lack)—that has made him something of a household name. Over the last few years, he has discussed the role of science and research on Charlie Rose's talk show on PBS, Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

In print

Greene has penned a handful of popular-science bestsellers, including 1999's The Elegant Universe, which was a Pulitzer finalist, and The Fabric of the Cosmos, which came out in 2004.

On the side

Greene had a cameo in the 2000 Dennis Quaid quack-science movie Frequency (in which a man talks to his long-dead father via HAM radio). He also served as a science advisor to the TV show Third Rock From The Sun and the recent Denzel Washington vehicle Déjà Vu.

Personal

The vegan Greene and his current wife Tracy Day live on Riverside Drive.

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