About the Author

Bulent Atalay, author of Math and the Mona Lisa, 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"

Bulent 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 already appeared in ten languages, with another (Spanish) still pending. He has just completed collaboration on a new book, Leonardo's Universe: the Renaissance World of Leonardo da Vinci, with Keith Wamsley. The book will be released by National Geographic Books in 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.  He has given colloquia to engineers at NASA and NIST; physicians at Johns Hopkins; and physicists at, Caltech, Stanford, Georgetown, and the Universities of Oxford, Istanbul, and Vienna.  He has addressed historians at Harvard, and the art community at Cornell, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He is a regular keynote speaker to gifted students at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. He is also a frequent lecturer at the Smithsonian Institution and on board ships of the Crystal and Silverseas Cruise Lines.