Mario Livio is an Israeli-American astrophysicist and an author of works that popularize science and mathematics.
He is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Science. From 1991 to 2015, he was an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which conducts the scientific program of the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. His 2002 book The Golden Ratio won the Peano Prize and the International Pythagoras Prize for popular books on Mathematics.
Livio was a professor of physics at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology from 1981 to 1991. He did extensive work on supernova explosions, on the rate of expansion of the universe, and on dark energy. He also worked on accretion onto white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. From 2010, his work focused on extrasolar planets and on astrophysical processes related to the emergence of life in the universe.
He has a Bachelor’s degree in Physics and Mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a Master’s degree in Theoretical Particle Physics from the Weizmann Institute, and Ph.D. in Theoretical Astrophysics from Tel Aviv University. He was born in Bucharest, Romania.
