Isaac Asimov

Biography

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) was an American writer and biochemist who became one of the most prolific and influential authors of the twentieth century, particularly in science fiction. Born in Petrovichi, Russia, Asimov’s family emigrated to the United States when he was three. He earned a PhD in biochemistry from Columbia University and taught at Boston University while maintaining an extraordinary literary output spanning nearly 500 books across virtually every category of the Dewey Decimal System. Asimov’s science fiction is defined by his “Three Laws of Robotics” and the Foundation series, which reimagined the genre by emphasizing ideas, logic, and social science over space-opera action. His Robot stories explored the ethical implications of artificial intelligence decades before AI became a real-world concern. The Foundation trilogy, inspired by Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, imagined a galactic civilization guided by the predictive science of “psychohistory.” Asimov was also one of the twentieth century’s greatest science popularizers, writing accessible books on subjects from astronomy to Shakespeare. His influence on science fiction, popular science, and the cultural imagination of technology is immeasurable.