Mario Livio is an astrophysicist and author: thirty years on accretion, novae and the expansion of the universe, then 8 books written for readers with no mathematics behind them. All 325 publications are indexed here, by subject.
Each one is built on a single question, and each is written so the question survives without the equations. The books by Mario Livio run from cosmology through group theory to the psychology of curiosity.
The books by Mario Livio are treated one at a time on their own page, with what each argues and who it is for. Every book in detail
The research record divides more cleanly than most. Accretion is the spine of it — matter falling onto a compact object, losing angular momentum, heating as it goes — and it turns up in 73 of the 325 entries indexed on this site. The single largest group is novae and cataclysmic variables, 90 entries, beginning with two 1975 papers written with Giora Shaviv on the light curve of HZ Herculis and on X-ray sources in planetary nebulae.
From there the subject widens without shifting. Papers on the stability of accretion disks in the late 1970s lead into work on jets and on the coalescence of white dwarfs; the white-dwarf merger papers of the late 1980s connect directly to Type Ia supernovae, which is where the record turns toward cosmology. Thirty-three entries deal with supernovae and cosmic expansion, and they cluster in the years when Type Ia supernovae were becoming the instrument that measured the expansion history of the universe.
The shape of the output is itself informative. Half of everything in the index — 168 of 325 entries, 52 per cent — falls in the 1990s, the decade at the Space Telescope Science Institute when Hubble was returning data and the supernova cosmology results were arriving. The 1980s account for 82 entries and the 2000s for 66. The Astrophysical Journal carries 127 of them, with Monthly Notices at 34 and Astronomy & Astrophysics at 28; 9 reached Nature.
Collaboration is the other visible pattern. James Truran appears on 25 of the entries, James Pringle on 20 and Noam Soker on 19 — long working relationships, not one-off papers. Giora Shaviv, the co-author on the two earliest entries from 1975, appears on 14 in total. Reading the index by co-author instead of by date gives a different and more accurate picture of how the work was actually done.
The two halves of the career are not separate. Working as an astrophysicist and author at the same institute for two decades, he took the questions the papers could only gesture at and gave them a book each. A smaller strand is easy to miss: the question of whether the universe is arranged so that intelligent life can appear in it. That thread surfaces in the research and then becomes the argument of the popular books.
The Parthenon, the Mona Lisa and the Great Pyramid are the three phi claims everyone repeats. None of the three survives measurement — and what does survive is stranger than the myth it replaced.
Read the piece
Évariste Galois died at twenty in a duel, having written down the structure that now describes symmetry in crystals, in particle physics and in music. Group theory is less a description of symmetry than its grammar.
Read the pieceMario Livio was born in Romania in 1945 and emigrated to Israel in 1950. He read physics and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, took an M.Sc. in theoretical particle physics at the Weizmann Institute, and a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics at Tel Aviv University.
He taught physics at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology from 1981 until 1991, then joined the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore as head of its Archive Branch, later serving as head of the Institute’s Science Division.
Full biography
Mario Livio is an astrophysicist and author, born in Romania in 1945 and educated in Israel. He spent a decade teaching physics at the Technion before joining the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore in 1991, where he headed first the Archive Branch and later the Science Division. Alongside the research he has written 8 books for general readers.
The Accelerating Universe (2000), The Golden Ratio (2002), The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved (2005), Is God a Mathematician? (2009), Brilliant Blunders (2013) and Why? What Makes Us Curious (2017). The Golden Ratio is the usual starting point; Brilliant Blunders is the least technical.
Accretion — matter falling onto white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes — runs through the whole record, and accounts for 73 of the 325 entries indexed here. Novae and cataclysmic variables are the largest single group. From the 1990s the work turns toward supernovae as distance markers and the expansion history they imply.
This index holds 325 entries dated 1975 to 2008, taken from his own published list of publications: refereed papers, conference proceedings, popular articles and edited volumes. That is the record as that list carried it, and it is not the same figure as a career total.
No — it is an independently maintained reference index of published work: the books, the papers and the ideas they deal with. The site also carries a few older articles on unrelated subjects.