Nationality Swedish-American Role Cosmologist Name Max Tegmark | Institutions MIT Fields Cosmology Physics | |
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Born May 5, 1967 (age 56) Sweden ( 1967-05-05 ) Alma mater Royal Institute of TechnologyBerkeley Spouse Angelica de Oliveira-Costa (m. 1997–2009) Books Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality Children Alexander Tegmark, Philip Tegmark Parents Karin Tegmark, Harold S. Shapiro Education University of California, Berkeley, Royal Institute of Technology | ||
Cosmology max tegmark lecture 1 of 3
Max Erik Tegmark (born Max Shapiro 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American cosmologist. Tegmark is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute. He is also a co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, and has accepted donations from Elon Musk to investigate existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence.
Contents
- Cosmology max tegmark lecture 1 of 3
- Cosmology max tegmark lecture 2 of 3
- Early life
- Career
- Personal life
- In the media
- Books
- References
Cosmology max tegmark lecture 2 of 3
Early life
Tegmark was born in Sweden, the son of Karin Tegmark and American-born professor emeritus of mathematics Harold S. Shapiro. He graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and the Stockholm School of Economics and later received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. After having worked at the University of Pennsylvania, he is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in high school, Tegmark and a friend created and sold a word processor written in pure machine code for the Swedish eight-bit computer ABC 80, and a 3D Tetris-like game.
Career
His research has focused on cosmology, combining theoretical work with new measurements to place constraints on cosmological models and their free parameters, often in collaboration with experimentalists. He has over 200 publications, of which nine have been cited over 500 times. He has developed data analysis tools based on information theory and applied them to cosmic microwave background experiments such as COBE, QMAP, and WMAP, and to galaxy redshift surveys such as the Las Campanas Redshift Survey, the 2dF Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
With Daniel Eisenstein and Wayne Hu, he introduced the idea of using baryon acoustic oscillations as a standard ruler. With Angelica de Oliveira-Costa and Andrew Hamilton, he discovered the anomalous multipole alignment in the WMAP data sometimes referred to as the "axis of evil". With Anthony Aguirre, he developed the cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Tegmark has also formulated the "Ultimate Ensemble theory of everything", whose only postulate is that "all structures that exist mathematically exist also physically". This simple theory, with no free parameters at all, suggests that in those structures complex enough to contain self-aware substructures (SASs), these SASs will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically "real" world. This idea is formalized as the mathematical universe hypothesis, described in his book Our Mathematical Universe.
Tegmark was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2012 for, according to the citation, "his contributions to cosmology, including precision measurements from cosmic microwave background and galaxy clustering data, tests of inflation and gravitation theories, and the development of a new technology for low-frequency radio interferometry".
Personal life
He was married to astrophysicist Angelica de Oliveira-Costa in 1997, and divorced in 2009. They have two sons. On August 5, 2012, Tegmark married Meia Chita, a Boston University Ph.D. candidate.