Shahn Majid
[3][4] In 2008, he edited and co-authored an ambitious book of essays On Space and Time along with Alain Connes, Roger Penrose, John Polkinghorne, Michal Heller and Andrew Taylor, in which the authors aim to expose the frontier of scientific research on the small and large scale structure of the Universe to a general but scientifically interested audience.At age five, he moved with his family from India to the UK, where his father went on to become a noted orthopaedic surgeon and his mother a primary school teacher and a published poet.At Harvard, he was a tutor at Eliot House, while engaged in his PhD jointly between the physics and pure mathematics departments, under Arthur Jaffe and Clifford Taubes respectively.Halfway through his PhD research Vladimir Drinfeld and Michio Jimbo found another and more popular class of these objects, but the bicrossproduct ones have had a resurgence of interest in recent years.The 1994 Majid-Ruegg model in particular turned out to be testable by data now being collected by the GLAST-Fermi gamma ray space telescope.The subtle interplay between the creativity of pure mathematics and the fact-driven agenda of physics form the basis of a general philosophy of Relative Realism in which Majid argues that the nature of physical reality is not fundamentally different from the way that topics in pure mathematics are on the one hand created by definitions and on the other hand 'out there' waiting to be invented.