I was almost born aboard a ship on the high seas. My father, who in his lifetime was known only as Captain Aczel, was the captain of a cruise ship that plowed the Mediterranean in the 1950s and 1960s: sailing among Haifa and Piraeus, Naples, Marseille, and Barcelona; and on some years to Venice; at other times the ship went to Rhodes, Monte Carlo, and the Balearic Islands, as well as other jewels of the Mediterranean. In later years we also did Caribbean cruises. In the early days, few people flew, so most normal overseas travel was done in style: on board a passenger ship with waiters and barmen and cabin crew to take care of your every need. When my mother was in the eighth month of her pregnancy, my father—who among heroic acts for the Allies during WWII, for some of which he had won medals, had also once successfully delivered a baby on board ship and swore he’d never do it again—insisted she go ashore. So I was born on terra firma—but within a couple of months my mother and I were back on the cruise ship. Growing up this way—attending school part of the year and making the difference up by correspondence and with tutors—I learned a lot about life at an early age. I learned languages—I now speak seven of them, from fairly well to fluent—and geography, history, art, and science. One place I often visited as a child growing up on a cruise ship was Monte Carlo. As soon as our ship would anchor outside the rocky independent principality of Monaco, most of the passengers and crew would rush to the famous Casino de Monte Carlo, and at the Captain's Table that night, we would hear tales of glory: fortunes gained and lost at the famous roulette tables (perhaps many of them made up, as I learned as I grew older and understood the dangers of gambling). As a minor, I obviously wasn’t allowed inside the casino, and had to stay in the outside corridor, taken care of by stewards. But what was taking place inside—in the forbidden land as it were—held a strange fascination to me. At a fairly young age I became fascinated by the mathematics of probability and gambling. I think there was some genetic component here as well: my father was Hungarian of birth, and a number of our relatives in Hungary have been mathematicians, and one of them still is. In 1972 I went to Berkeley and studied mathematics and physics and, later, operations research. Later I earned a Ph.D. in statistics. I spent my career teaching mathematics and statistics, and traveled widely. In 1996 I wrote my bestselling book, Fermat’s Last Theorem, which has been translated into 22 languages and was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award that year. In 2004, I was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. From 2005 to 2007, I was a visiting scholar in the history of science at Harvard University. I am currently a research fellow in the history of science at Boston University. I often write articles about science, and some have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Jerusalem Post, The London Times, and other papers. I also authored a dozen research articles on mathematics, and two textbooks. But my primary occupation is writing popular books on science—it is my passion to bring science to everyone. My latest book is Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. This was an amazing book to write! I visited CERN a few times and saw the actual giant Collider; I also interviewed the world’s top physicists for this project. The book is published during October, 2010, by Crown Publishing. My previous books include: Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Launched the Nuclear Age (Macmillan, 2009), The Cave and the Cathedral (Wiley, 2009), The Jesuit and the Skull: Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man (Riverhead, 2007), Descartes’ Secret Notebook (Broadway, 2005), The Mystery of the Aleph (Four Walls, 2000; Pocket Books, 2001), God’s Equation (Four Walls, 1999; Dell, 2000), The Riddle of the Compass (Harcourt, 2001), Entanglement: the Greatest Mystery in Physics (Four Walls, 2002; Plume, 2003), and Pendulum (Atria Books, 2003), all of which have appeared on various bestseller lists in the United States and abroad. My books have been published in thirty-two countries. They have also been widely reviewed, including six reviews in The New York Times, as well as several each in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Globe & Mail, Scientific American (“Editor’s Choice:” Riddle of the Compass, 2001), Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and many others. Most of my books have received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. I have appeared on over forty television programs, including nationwide appearances on the CBS Evening News, CNN, CNBC, Nightline ABC, and on over a hundred and fifty radio programs, including NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” “Morning Edition,” and “Talk of the Nation Science Friday.” I have lectured about my books and other science topics at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. My lectures are usually sold out months in advance.