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Dyson, Freeman John

British Space Futurist 1923-

Freeman John Dyson is a space futurist who has envisioned the creation of various human habitats in space. Born December 15, 1923, in Crowthorne, England, he received his bachelor of arts degree from Cambridge University in 1945. From 1943 to 1945, during World War II, he served in Operations Research with the Royal Air Force Bomber Command.

A fellow at Trinity College at Cambridge University in England and a commonwealth fellow at Cornell University, Dyson taught at Princeton University from 1947 to 1949. He was a physics professor at Cornell from 1951 to 1953 and also served as a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. Since 1994 he has served as professor emeritus at Princeton. Dyson has received many honors and honorary degrees. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, London, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society.

Dyson has written and spoken widely on cosmology, nuclear physics, technology, weapons control, and philosophy. In 1959 he proposed human habitats in space that came to be known as Dyson spheres. Such habitats would surround a star harnessing light and energy to support communities of billions of people. Dyson later developed an interest in asteroids as human habitats in space. Dyson wrote a number of widely read and respected books, including Disturbing the Universe (1979);Weapons and Hope (1984);Origins of Life (1986);Infinite in All Directions (1988);From Eros to Gaia(1992);Imagined Worlds (1997); and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet(1999).