About the Author

Bulent Atalay, author of Math and the Mona Lisa: the Art and Science of Leonaardo da Vinci (Smithsonian Books, 2004), and Leonardo's Universe: the Renaissance World of Leonardo da Vinci (National Geographic Books, 2009), is a scientist and artist with roots in Turkey, England, and the United States. His grandfather was a young Turkish military officer who survived eight months of the Gallipoli Campaign of WWI, and was subsequently killed while fighting Lawrence of Arabia in 1916. His father was also a military officer, as well as a diplomat who held successive assignments as military attaché during the post-war (WWII) period to London, Paris, and Washington. Read "A Tribute to General Kemal Atalay"

Atalay received an early classical education in England and the United States, attending Eton (UK) and St. Andrew's School (Delaware), site of the 1989 Robin Williams film, Dead Poet's Society. He went into physics by accident when a secretary in the college admissions office misread his career aspirations as "physicist" instead of "physician," but he found he had latent interests in physics. He received his professional training — BS, MS, MA, Ph.D. and post-doctoral work in theoretical physics — at Georgetown, UC-Berkeley, Princeton and Oxford.  Now, he is a professor of physics at the University of Mary Washington, an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. An accomplished artist, Atalay has presented his works in one-man exhibitions in London and Washington, and his two books of lithographs — Lands of Washington and Oxford and the English Countryside — can be found in the permanent collections of Buckingham Palace, the Smithsonian, and the White House. Four years after the release of Math and the Mona Lisa by Smithsonian Books in April 2004, the book has appeared in eleven languages, with the twelfth, Polish, still pending. Leonardo's Universe, coauthored with former student Keith Wamsley, was released by National Geographic Books on January 6, 2009, although the Britannica Blog published on Dec. 30, 2008, jumped the gun, listing it as one of "Ten Must-Have Books for 2008."

Lectures  - Domestic and Abroad

Professor Atalay, whose permanent home is in Virginia, lectures around the world, mostly on the "A-subjects" — art, archaeology, astrophysics and atomic physics... — admitting he knows much less about the "B-subjects — businesss, banking, botany... He has addressed physicians at Johns Hopkins and the NIH; physicists, mathematicians and engineers at NASA, Caltech, Stanford, Georgetown, Harvard, and NIST. Abroad he has given talks at the Universities of Oxford, Istanbul, Vienna, as well as a number of of universities in Japan and Korea. He has addressed the art community at Cornell, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), and the High Museum (Atlanta, GA). He is a regular keynote speaker to gifted students at Thomas Jefferson High School, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. Most recently his venues have included the Smithsonian Institution, National Geographic Society, and the Aspen Institute, the Cosmos Club — Washington, DC and Yale University. Finally, he is a frequent lecturer on board ships of the Crystal and Silverseas Cruise Lines.