An expert on black holes, Brandon Carter is a director of research at the Laboratoire de l’Univers ses Théories, a center for theoretical astrophysics, on the Meudon campus of the Paris Observatory, now affiliated with France’s National Center for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.). He is widely known for introducing the term “anthropic principle,” the “strong” version of which has commonly been misrepresented in an oversimplified form as the concept that the presence of life, in particular the presence of intelligent observers, constrains the nature of the universe. As actually formulated by Dr. Carter (first at the 1973 Krakow symposium celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of Copernicus and, in more developed form, at a 1983 Royal Society meeting in London), the original “weak” anthropic principle was actually a (Bayesian) prescription for taking account of the inevitable bias in the interpretation of what we see in the universe, due to our biological nature as intelligent observers, by attribution of equal a priori probability to all comparable (terrestrial or extraterrestrial) observers, wherever they may exist in the past, present, or future. The more controversial “strong” version of the anthropic principle involved a further hypothesis to the effect that beyond the part of the universe we perceive directly, there may be other parts, with possibly different values of the fine structure constant or other such fundamental parameters, whose (biologically favorable) observed values may then be explicable as the consequence of a selection effect. Recently Dr. Carter’s work has focused on neutrino stars, cosmic strings, and brane dynamics. An Australian by birth, he was educated at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, began his undergraduate work in physics and mathematics at St. Andrew’s University, and completed it at Cambridge University where he studied at Pembroke College. He went on to take his Ph.D. in mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge in 1968. For the next four years, he was a research fellow at Pembroke and did post-doctoral research as a member of the university’s Institute of Astronomy. In 1973, he joined the Cambridge faculty as a lecturer in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, a post he held for two years until joining the staff of the C.N.R.S. as a researcher in astrophysics. He assumed his present position in 2002. Dr. Carter has been a visiting scientist at Princeton University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, and Cambridge’s Isaac Newton Institute. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he is the author of more than one hundred scientific papers.