Mario Livio was born in 1945 in Romania. When he was 5 years old, he immigrated with his grandparents to Israel. He received undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a M.Sc. degree in theoretical particle physics at the Weizmann Institute, and a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics at Tel-Aviv University. He was a professor of physics at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology from 1981 until 1991. He is a senior astrophysicist at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute. He has published over 400 scientific papers. He has also written several books including The Accelerating Universe, The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved, Is God a… Mathematician?, and Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe. The Golden Ratio received the International Pythagoras Prize and the Peano Prize.