Physicist to succeed Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University

Michael Green the physicist specializing in string theory, will replace Stephen Hawking in his post at England’s University of Cambridge. Hawking stepped down Sept. 30 from the Professorship of Mathematics chair once held by Isaac Newton.
By: SPPID.org
 
Oct. 24, 2009 - PRLog -- Michael Green is to become the 18th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics on November 1. The position was created in 1663 by Henry Lucas, a British parliamentarian and philanthropist, and its first occupant was Sir Isaac Newton.

Prof Hawking announced late last month that after 30 years he would be quitting the position on his 67th birthday, as required by the rules of the university.

Prof Green was elected to his new job by senior staff at Cambridge. The university describes him as “a pioneer of string theory from the early ’70s onwards.” It noted that in 1984 he and a California colleague discovered “anomaly cancellation”, which opened the door to further research in the field.

String theory tries to explain how gravity works at the microscopic level. It postulates that particles are not points but loops of string defined by their oscillation. It is very complicated, unproved and still developing.

Prof Green was born in 1946 and so is eligible to hold the Lucasian post until 2013. He obtained his doctorate from Cambridge and did post-doctoral work at Princeton University in the US and Oxford University in England. He has also taught at the University of London.

His professional honours include winning, in 2004, the Institute of Physics’s Dirac medal, a theoretical physics award that is named after Paul Dirac, who himself held the Lucasian professorship from 1932 to 1969.

Peter Haynes, head of Cambridge’s department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics, said of Prof Green and his work: “In the department he continues to make important advances in this topic and at the same time to support and inspire young researchers. His appointment as Lucasian professor continues the very distinguished tradition of that post.”

While Prof Green is not widely known, his predecessor was quite the opposite.

Beyond his research, Prof Hawking achieved renown through his best-selling book A Brief History of Time, and even appeared on an episode of The Simpsons in which a character had been sucked into an alternate dimension. He also appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Prof Hawking remains with Cambridge as director of research. The university says “he will continue to lead research efforts in cosmology and gravitation within [the math and physics department], with substantial support from the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

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