Neil Turok

Neil Geoffrey Turok (1959) is originally a South African cosmologist, now living in Britain. Since 1998, he has been Professor of Mathematical Physics at the DAMTP, University of Cambridge and a work colleague of Stephen Hawking. He held a previous research post at Princeton University. His father, Prof Ben Turok, is an economist and an ANC Muizenberg member of parliament, as well as a well known freedom fighter agaist apartheid for equality among all races in South Africa.

Turok founded the African Institute Of Mathematical Sciences in 2003.

Turok won his Ph.D. at Imperial College under the supervision of Tom W.B.Kibble, the prominent English cosmologist whose seminal work initiated the field of "cosmic strings". During that time, Turok formulated the theory of "textures" as an explanation of cosmic structure, now largely discredited.

Turok quick-started research of the "instanton" process as an explanation for the beginning of the Universe (with Stephen Hawking), a field of research that gained impetus in the late nineties, but that quickly subsided after a few years.