Mario Livio
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mario Livio (born 1945) is an astrophysicist and an author of works that popularize science and mathematics. He is currently Senior Astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute. He is perhaps best known for his book on the irrational number phi: The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number (2002). The book won the Peano Prize and the International Pythagoras Prize for popular books on mathematics.
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[edit] Life and scientific career
Born in Romania, Livio stayed with his grandparents when his mother and father were forced to flee the country for political reasons. Livio himself left Romania at age five with his grandparents, and the family settled in Israel. He served with the Israeli Defense Forces as a paramedic in the Six Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the war in Lebanon (1982).
Livio completed a B.S. degree in physics and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned an M.S. degree in theoretical particle physics at the Weizmann Institute and a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics at Tel-Aviv University. He was a professor of physics at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology from 1981 to 1991 before coming to the Hubble Institute. He and his wife Sofie, a microbiologist, have three children.
For the past decade Livio has focused his research activities on supernova explosions and their use in determining the rate of expansion of the universe. He has also studied so-called "dark energy", black holes, and the formation of planetary systems around young stars. He has authored or co-authored dozens of papers in refereed journals on these and other subjects in astrophysics.
[edit] Popular works
For almost twenty years Livio has popularized abstruse subjects in astronomy and mathematics through books, lectures, magazine articles, and radio and television appearances. He has delivered popular lectures at such venues as the Smithsonian Institution, the Hayden Planetarium, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and the Glasgow Science Centre. He has appeared on PBS, NPR and CBS, among other radio and TV outlets, to discuss scientific and mathematical subjects.
Livio's first book of popular science was The Accelerating Universe (2000), which explained in layman's terms the theory that the universe was expanding at a faster and faster rate. He explored the possible causes and the theoretical implications of such apparently infinite expansion, especially its effect on beliefs about the "beautiful" laws supposedly governing the cosmos.
A self-described "art fanatic" who owns hundreds of art books, Livio put this interest to good use in his next book, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi (2002). He traced the influence of the golden ratio through many centuries of art, architecture, music, and even stock market theories. Written in a clear, humorous style and profusely illustrated, the book sold well and made mathematics accessible to even the most math-phobic readers.
Livio's The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved (2005) explains how efforts to solve the quintic equation led to group theory and to the mathematics of symmetry. He emphasizes the crucial roles of Évariste Galois and Niels Henrik Abel in developing this branch of mathematics. He also "keeps the hard stuff to a minimum," in the words of a Publishers Weekly review. The book contains biographical sketches of Galois, Abel and several other mathematicians.
[edit] References
[edit] Books by Mario Livio
- The Accelerating Universe: Infinite Expansion, the Cosmological Constant, and the Beauty of the Cosmos, Wiley 2000, ISBN 0-471-39976-0
- The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number, Broadway 2002, ISBN 0-7679-0815-5
- The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry, Souvenir Press 2006, ISBN 0-285-63743-6
