Janna Levin

Janna Levin

American theoretical cosmologist and associate professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College. Much of his work is about looking for evidence to support the proposition that our universe might be finite in size because it has a nontrivial topology. He also works on black holes and chaos theory. In addition, she is the director of science at Pioneer Works. Levin is the author of the popular science book How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space. In 2006, he published A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, a novel chronicling the lives and deaths of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, which won the PEN/Bingham Award. Levin has written essays to accompany exhibitions at various British galleries such as the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and the Hayward Gallery. He appeared on Talk of the Nation in July 2002; as a guest on Stephen Colbert's show, The Colbert Report, in August 2006; and has been a special guest on the radio program Speaking of Faith in February 2009. He presented the TED talk "The sound the universe makes" in 2011. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Tow Professor. His book The Blues of Black Holes and Other Melodies from Outer Space (2016) is about the history of the laser interferometer observatory of gravitational waves and the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015.