Bio

George Ellis, Ph.D., is professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town. After completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge University with Dennis Sciama as supervisor, he lectured at Cambridge and has been visiting Professor at Texas University, the University of Chicago, Hamburg University, Boston University, the University of Alberta, and Queen Mary College (London University). He has written many papers on relativity theory and cosmology, among them The Large Scale Structure of Space Time co-authored with Stephen Hawking (Cambridge University Press,1973); Before the Beginning: Cosmology Explained (Merion Boyars, 1993); Is the Universe Open or Closed? The Density of Matter in the Universe with Peter Coles (Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Dynamical Systems in Cosmology with John Wainwright. He has also written on science policy and developmental issues, science education, and science and religion issues. He is co-author with Nancey Murphy of On the Moral Nature of the Universe (Fortress Press, 1996) and editor of The Far-flung Universe: Eschatology from a Cosmic Perspective (Templeton Foundation Press, 2002). He is past president of the International Society of General Relativity and Gravitation and of the Royal Society of South Africa and fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. Among the prizes and honorary degrees he has received are the Claude Harris Leon Foundation Achievement Award, the Gold Medal of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Star of South Africa Medal, which was presented to him in 1999 by President Nelson Mandela.