LiberPress Camins Award 2010

Born in Chicago in 1954, he is the son of survivors of the Holocaust. His father was a leader in the Jewish resistance in Czestochowa, Poland, and was sent to the extermination camp at Buchenwald in 1944, until he was released by the troops of General Patton. His mother was deported to a work camp. They both emigrated to the USA. He went to Brandeis University, in Waltham, in 1972, but the following year he travelled to Israel to work on a kibbutz. He returned to Brandeis in 1974 and graduated in 1976 in mathematics and physics, having also studied chemistry. In 1981 he was awarded a doctorate in theoretical physics at the University of Berkeley, California. He has written scripts for series such as Hunter, MacGyver and Star Trek, while continuing to do research in the field of physics.

In 1993 he became a producer, executive producer and computer game designer, many of his games winning gold medals, and he worked with Stephen Spielberg, Robin Williams and the Walt Disney Company. He went to live in New York, and was appointed Vice President for Software Development at Scholastic Inc., the great recreational and scientific publisher that publishes the Harry Potter series. On 11 September 2001, during the terrorist attack on the twin towers, he was at the World Trade Center. He returned to Los Angeles to give classes at the Caltech faculty. He wrote the screenplay for the IMAX film Beyond the horizon, currently in production.

He has written a number of books, including Euclid’s Window: The story of geometry from parallel lines to hyperspace (2001); Feynman’s Rainbow: a search for beauty in physics and in life (2003); A Briefer History of Time (2005), co-authored with Stephen Hawking; The Drunkard’s Walk: how randomness rules our lives (2008), and The Grand Design (2010), translated into twenty-five languages, co-authored with Stephen Hawking. With Matt Costello he also wrote children’s books, such as The Last Dinosaur and Titanic Cat.