258

Michael Atiyah, “Pulling the Strings,” Nature 438 (December 22–29, 2005): 1,081.

259

Robert Mills, “Beauty and Truth,” in Chen Ning Yang: A Great Physicist of the 20th Century, ed. Shing-Tung Yau and C. S. Liu (Boston: International Press, 1995), p. 199.

260

Henry Tye (Cornell University), e-mail letter to author, December 19, 2008.

261

Brian Greene, interview by Ira Flatow, “Big Questions in Cosmology,” Science Friday, NPR, April 3, 2009.

262

К. C. Cole, “A Theory of Everything,” New York Times Magazine, October 18, 1987.

263

Nicolai Reshetikhin (University of California, Berkeley), interview with author, June 5, 2008.

264

Robbert Dijkgraaf (University of Amsterdam), interview with author, February 8, 2007.

265

Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 210.

266

Andrew Strominger (Harvard University), interview with author, August 1, 2007.

267

S. Ramanujan, “On Certain Arithmetic Functions,” Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 22 (1916): 159–184.

268

Lothar Goettsche, “A Conjectural Generating Function for Numbers of Curves on Surfaces,” November II, 1997, arXiv.org, Cornell University archives, http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/alg-geom/pdf/9711/9711012vl.pdf.

269

Ai-Ko Liu, “Family Blowup Formula, Admissible Graphs and the Enumeration of Singular Curves, I,” Journal of Differential Geometry 56 (2000): 381–579.

270

Bong Lian (Brandeis University), interview with author, December 12, 2007.

271

Michael Atiyah, “Pulling the Strings,” Nature 438 (December 22–29, 2005): 1,082.

272

Glennda Chui, “Wisecracks Fly When Brian Greene and Lawrence Krauss Tangle Over String Theory,” Symmetry 4 (May 2007): 17–21.

273

Sean Carroll, “String Theory: Not Dead Yet,” Cosmic Variance blog, Discover online magazine, May 24,2007, http://cosmicvariance.com.

274

Edward Witten, quoted in К. C. Cole, “A Theory of Everything,” New York Times Magazine, October 18, 1987.

275

Ibid.

276

Alan Guth (MIT), interview with author, September 13, 2007.

277

Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), p. 261.

278

Max Tegmark (MIT), interview with author, October 23, 2007.

279

Faye Flam, “Getting Comfortable in Four Dimensions,” Science 266 (December 9, 1994): 1, 640.

280

Cumrun Vafa (Harvard University), interview with author, January 19, 2007.

281

Robbert Dijkgraaf (University of Amsterdam), interview with author, February 8, 2007.

282

David Morrison (University of California, Santa Barbara), interview with author, May 27, 2008.

283