Clifford A. Pickover is an American author, editor, and columnist in the fields of science, mathematics, and science fiction, and is employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York.
He received his Ph.D. in 1982 from Yale University's Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and graduated first in his class from Franklin and Marshall College.
He joined IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1982, as a member of the speech synthesis group and later worked on the design-automation workstations. For much of his career, Pickover has published technical articles in the areas of scientific visualization, computer art, and recreational mathematics. Pickover is still employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he is the editor of the IBM Journal of Research and Development.
He is currently an associate editor for the scientific journal Computers and Graphics and is an editorial board member for Odyssey and Leonardo. He is also the Brain-Strain columnist for Odyssey magazine, and, for many years, he was the Brain-Boggler columnist for Discover magazine.
Pickover has received over fifty invention achievement awards, three research division awards, and four external honor awards
Pickover is author of over 35 books on such topics as computers and creativity, art, mathematics, black holes, human behavior and intelligence, time travel, alien life, Einstein, religion, dimethyltryptamine elves, parallel universes, the nature of genius, and science fiction