Green, Michael Boris 1946-
English theoretical physicist

Born in London, he was educated at Cambridge, studied at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University (1970-72), and from 1972 to 1977 worked at Cambridge. He was then a Science and Engineering Council Advanced Fellow at Oxford from 1977 to 1979, became professor at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, in 1985, and returned to Cambridge in 1993 as John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Theoretical Physics. With John H Schwarz and Edward Witten, he was the founder of superstring theory. This is based on the idea that the ultimate constituents of nature, when inspected at very small scales, do not exist as point-like particles but as 'strings' in more than three dimensions. String theories are now considered very good candidates for the actual laws of physics at the ultimate small scale. For this work he was awarded the Maxwell Medal by the Institute of Physics (1987), the William Hopkins prize by the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1987) and the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (1989). He was elected FRS in 1989.