Brian Greene, one of the world's leading theoretical physicists and a brilliant, entertaining communicator of cutting-edge scientific concepts, will be speaking at the University in a free public lecture Thursday, Dec. 5. The 7 p.m. lecture is part of the College of Science's annual Discover Science Lecture Series.

Greene's lecture/performance, "Why Science Matters," takes the audience through a story of scientific exploration and discovery in pursuit of the quest to unravel some of the biggest mysteries of space and time.

His national bestseller, The Elegant Universe, sold more than a million copies and became an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning NOVA special that Greene hosted. His second book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, spent six months on The New York Times Best Sellers list and was adapted into a four-part NOVA miniseries aired on PBS. Greene's latest New York Times best-seller, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, was published in January 2011.

In 2008, Green co-founded The World Science Festival. The annual event's mission is to take science out of the laboratory, making the esoteric understandable and the familiar fascinating to the general public.

A graduate of Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Greene is a professor in both physics and mathematics at Columbia University. His work has appeared in Wired Magazine and The New York Times. He has appeared on a variety of programs, including Charlie Rose, Nightline and The Late Show with David Letterman, and made cameo appearances in the films Frequency, Maze, and The Last Mimzy. Greene appeared as himself in an April 2011 episode of the television show, The Big Bang Theory.

Now in its fourth year, the annual Discover Science Lecture Series features several presentations a year and has brought some of the world's leading scientists to the Reno-Sparks community to share their knowledge. This year the series will also bring to campus Alan Krause, a Mackay School of Mines geological engineering alum and chairman and CEO of MWH Global, whose engineering firm rebuilt the Panama Canal. The final speaker in the series will be Robert Ballard, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, underwater and maritime archaeology and most well-known for his discovery of the Titanic wreckage. Krause's lecture is Thursday, Feb. 6 and Ballard's is Thursday, April 3.

Past Discover Science Lecture Series speakers included Bill Nye the Science Guy, anthropologist Anna Roosevelt, physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Nobel Laureate and physicist Eric Cornell, chemist and green energy expert Harry Gray, Jeff Lieberman, musician, artist, researcher and host of "Time Warp" on the Discovery Channel and Michio Kaku, futurist and theoretical physicist.

Admission is free. Lectures are held in the Redfield Auditorium, Davidson Mathematics and Science Center at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Parking is reserved for the event on the upper level of the Brian J. Whalen Parking Complex. For more information, call 775-784-4591 or visit the College of Science webpages at www.unr.edu/science.