Michael Green (physicist)
British physicist
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ToursExplore Lably’s 3D toursEarly life and education
Green was born the son of Genia Green and Absalom Green. He attended William Ellis School in London and Churchill College, Cambridge where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in theoretical physics (1967) and a PhD in elementary particle theory (1970).
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Career
Following his PhD, Green did postdoctoral research at Princeton University (1970–72), Cambridge and the University of Oxford. Between 1978 and 1993 he was a Lecturer and Professor at Queen Mary College, University of London, and in July 1993 he was appointed John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. On 19 October 2009 he was confirmed as the next Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, to succeed Stephen Hawking on 1 November 2009. In 2015 he was succeeded in that chair by Michael Cates, a specialist in colloids, gels, and particulate materials.
Research
After many years in collaboration with John Henry Schwarz, he co-discovered type II string theory in 1982, and later the anomaly cancellation in type I string theory in 1984. This latter insight, named the Green–Schwarz mechanism, initiated the First Superstring Revolution. Green has also worked on Dirichlet boundary conditions in string theory which have led to the postulation of D-branes and instantons.