Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mario Livio is an Israeli-American astrophysicist born in Bucharest, Romania, on the 19th of June, 1945. He worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute for 24 years (1991-2015) and has published more than 400 scientific articles on topics including black holes, supernovae, and the origin of life. He is also a popular science author whose books cover mathematics, scientific history, and the expansion of the universe.
Together with co-authors D. Eichler, T. Piran, and D. Schramm, Livio published a paper predicting that merging neutron stars produce gamma-ray bursts, gravitational waves, and certain heavy elements. All three predictions were later confirmed by observation.
The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi (2002) won both the Peano Prize and the International Pythagoras Prize for popular books on mathematics. The book traces the influence of the irrational number phi across centuries of art, architecture, music, and stock market theories.
Brilliant Blunders (2013) investigates serious mistakes made by Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein. The book uses their errors to illuminate how science actually progresses.
In 1980, Livio published one of the first multi-dimensional numerical simulations of the collapse of a massive star and a supernova explosion. He was also among the pioneers in studying common envelope evolution of binary stars.
Is Earth Exceptional? (2024) was co-written with Nobel laureate Jack Szostak. The book describes cutting-edge research on the origin of life on Earth and the astronomical search for extraterrestrial life.