Turok, Neil

Neil Turok is one of the world's top physicists and founder of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), a centre for education and research based in Cape Town, South Africa. Currently the Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, he was formerly the Chair of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University and Professor of Physics at Princeton. With Stephen Hawking he developed the Hawking-Turok instanton solutions, which describe the birth of inflationary universes. He is the co-author, with Paul J. Steinhardt, of the critically acclaimed book Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang & Rewriting Cosmic History. He was awarded the 1992 James Clerk Maxwell medal of the U.K. Institute of Physics, and was recently honoured with a prestigious TED Prize and a "Most Innovative People" award at the 2008 World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship (WSIE). Born in South Africa, Turok now lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.;