Max Tegmark is a Swedish-American scientist whose works spans a variety of fields including physics, cosmology, and AI safety research. Since 2004, Tegmark has been a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studies consciousness and machine learning, and has published hundreds of articles in his fields, some of which have been very influential. He is the current president of the Future of Life Institute (FLI), which he co-founded in 2014. FLI works on the evaluation and prevention of potential existential risks, including AI, climate change, and thermonuclear war.

Born in Sweden in 1967, Tegmark immigrated to the United States in 1990 after receiving a degree in engineering physics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, a prestigious Swedish university. He received a PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1994. Since then, he has spent decades working in cosmology. In 2012, he was awarded a fellowship with the American Physical Society. His work on the measurement of the cosmic microwave background has added to our collective understanding of the early existence of our universe.

In his first book, Our Mathematical Universe, Tegmark defends a particular “theory of everything.