LEONARD SUSSKIND is the Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford University, and director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of numerous prizes including the science writing prize of the American Institute of Physics for his Scientific American article on black holes.
Susskind is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory, having, with Yoichiro Nambu and Holger Bech Nielsen, independently introduced the idea that particles could in fact be states of excitation of a relativistic string.
He is the author of The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design and The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. Susskind teaches a popular series of Stanford Continuing Studies courses in modern physics called The Theoretical Minimum. He has, with Art Friedman, written a series of companion books to the courses also called The Theorectical Minimum, the latest of which is Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory.
