“I think math is a hugely creative field, because there are some very well-defined operations that you have to work within. You are, in a sense, straightjacketed by the rules of the mathematics. But within that constrained environment, it's up to you what you do with the symbols.”

American physicist, professor, and science festival chairman

Brian Greene is an American physicist and professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He is known for his work on string theory and for co-founding the World Science Festival in 2008. He directs Columbia’s Center for Theoretical Physics and serves as chairman of the festival. Greene also co-discovered mirror symmetry, a relation between two different Calabi-Yau manifolds, and described the flop transition and the conifold transition, showing how topology can change smoothly in string theory.